“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.” – Carl Jung
An old paperback I possess advertises its author thus: “Doctor and scientist, visionary and thinker, Carl Jung ranks with Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud as one of the great minds of the twentieth century.” I apologize for offering my readers a mere book blurb, but I reproduce it because I do not entirely disagree with it. C.S. Lewis said that we are observers of the universe save in one thing: “That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men; we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information.” Carl Jung brought the powers of scientific discipline not only to human psychic behavior but to inner psychic experience; he began to make a science of the “inside information” Lewis proclaimed we had. For this he ranks with the great figures of our history.
Jung was unfortunately not a great writer; his writings are voluminous and disfigured by the jargon which disgraces all pursuits which wish to present themselves as ‘scientific.’ I am not opposed to precise nomenclature; and new, precise names can be highly revealing. But it takes some interpretive ingenuity to decipher that “the transference” (which he tells us is a major problem in psychology) is Jung’s term for love (among other things). A fellow-jargonist familiar with Jung’s term would nod in agreement and treat it as the most natural term there is (like a doctor calling death “necrosis”), but for the uninitiated it is problematic. And when such jargon piles up, the result is bad prose. And like many other Germanic titans with breathtaking ambitions – Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Spengler – his writing is not well organized.
In consequence one of the best avenues to Jung’s thought is his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. Here the doctor puts aside his labcoat and does not worry too much about making his words accord with the medical degree on the wall; and the act of reducing his eighty-plus years to 400 pages keeps Jung consistently within shouting distance of experiences (as opposed to theories). And biographical treatment is ultimately the most truthful: a man’s thought is a branch from the root of his life.
Nowadays we think of psychiatrists as mostly pharmacists whose job it is to homogenize individuals into mechanical-society functionality. But Jung was present for the bright-eyed youth of the discipline, when doctors were making contact with utterly unexplained phenomena and no one knew what was going on:
In my courses on hypnosis I used to inquire into the personal history of the patients whom I presented to the students. One case I still remember very well.
A middle-aged woman, apparently with a strong religious bent, appeared one day. She was fifty-eight years old, and came on crutches, led by her maid. For seventeen years she had been suffering from a painful paralysis in the left leg. I placed her in a comfortable chair and asked her for her story. She began to tell it to me, and how terrible it all was – the whole long tale of her illness came out with the greatest circumstantiality. Finally I interrupted her and said, ‘Well now, we have no more time for so much talk. I am now going to hypnotize you.’
I had scarcely said the words when she closed her eyes and fell into a profound trance – without any hypnosis at all! I wondered at this, but did not disturb her. She went on talking without pause, and related the most remarkable dreams – dreams that represented a fairly deep experience of the unconscious. This, however, I did not understand until years later. At the time I assumed she was in a kind of delirium. The situation was gradually growing rather uncomfortable for me. Here were twenty students present, to whom I was going to demonstrate hypnosis!
After half an hour of this, I wanted to awaken the patient again. She would not wake up. I became alarmed; it occurred to me that I might inadvertently have probed into a latent psychosis. It took some ten minutes before I succeeded in waking her. All the while I dared not let the students observe my nervousness. When the woman came to, she was giddy and confused. I said to her, ‘I am the doctor, and everything is all right.’ Whereupon she cried out, ‘But I am cured!’ threw away her crutches, and was able to walk. Flushed with embarrassment, I said to the students, ‘Now you’ve seen what can be done with hypnosis!’ In fact I had not the slightest idea what had happened.
That was one of the experiences that prompted me to abandon hypnosis. I could not understand what had really happened, but the woman was in fact cured, and departed in the best of spirits. I asked her to let me hear from her, since I counted on a relapse in twenty-four hours at the latest. But her pains did not recur; in spite of my skepticism, I had to accept the fact of her cure. (117-8)
This kind of story is found all over Jung’s account of his medical career; innumerable physical difficulties are found to have a psychic basis, and often merely allowing the person to express their own inner reality is enough to cure them. If this seems unrealistic today, it is partially because psychology has permeated through society enough and works its cures quickly and routinely (I know a woman who in her mid-twenties suffered from spinal curvature so pronounced she became a hunchback, and so painful she would spend weeks on end in bed, who was cured by six months of psychotherapy – and a divorce). Although Jung does not compare eras, the evidence he presents suggests that the asexual, mechanical, unemotional Germanic fin-de-siecle society was not a good place for psychic health, especially in the cities; he never seems surprised that he lived at the epicenter of the two most horrible wars in human history, which he sees as the natural product of a society that takes everything seriously except its own inner experience.
Jung sums up his encounter with this in his early career as a doctor, before he learned to integrate his interests and emotions – one might say his destiny – into his work:
With my work at Burgholzi, life took on an undivided reality – all intention, consciousness, duty, and responsibility. It was an entry into the monastery of the world, a submission to the vow to believe only in what was probable, average, commonplace, barren of meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and reduce anything extraordinary to the banal. Henceforth there were only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations, accidents without coherence, knowledge that shrank to ever smaller circles, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine. (112)
For many people, this is the sum total of their lives – with purchased entertainment to fill in the desperate gaps. But Jung broke through. He does not attempt to dramatize his development, but the key shift appears to have been abandoning medical orthodoxy – managing problems, maintaining clinical detachment – and beginning to try to meet his patients as people. The way he tells their stories – which are remarkable (if there is not a compilation of Jung’s accounts of his cases, there should be) – shows how much he respected them. But this conviction had to grow in him:
Regarding them from the outside, all we see of the mentally ill is their tragic destruction, rarely the life of that side of the psyche which is turned away from us. Outward appearances are frequently deceptive, as I discovered to my astonishment in the case of a young catatonic patient. She was eighteen years old, and came from a cultivated family. At the age of fifteen she had been seduced by her brother and abused by a schoolmate. From her sixteenth year on, she retreated into isolation. She concealed herself from people, and ultimately the only emotional relationship left to her was one with a vicious watchdog which belonged to another family, and which she tried to win over. She grew steadily odder, and at seventeen was taken to the mental hospital, where she spent a year and a half. She heard voices, refused food, and was completely mutistic (i.e., no longer spoke). When I first saw her she was in a typical catatonic state.
In the course of many weeks I succeeded, very gradually, in persuading her to speak. After overcoming many resistances, she told me that she had lived on the moon. The moon, it seemed, was inhabited, but at first she had seen only men. They had at once taken her with them and deposited her in a sublunar dwelling where their children and wives were kept. For on the high mountains of the moon there lived a vampire who kidnapped and killed the women and children, so that the moon people were threatened with extinction. That was the reason for the sublunar existence of the feminine half of the population.
My patient made up her mind to do something for the moon people, and planned to destroy the vampire. After long preparations, she waited for the vampire on the platform of a tower which had been erected for this purpose. After a number of nights she at last saw the monster approaching from afar, winging his way toward her like a great black bird. She took her long sacrificial knife, concealed it in her gown, and waited for the vampire’s arrival. Suddenly he stood before her. He had several pairs of wings. His face and entire figure were covered by them, so that she could see nothing but his feathers. Wonder-struck, she was seized by curiosity to find out what he really looked like. She approached, hand on the knife. Suddenly the wings opened and a man of unearthly beauty stood before her. He enclosed her in his winged arms with an iron grip, so that she could no longer wield the knife. In any case she was so spellbound by the vampire’s look that she would not have been capable of striking. He raised her from the platform and flew off with her.
After this revelation she was once again able to speak without inhibition, and now her resistances emerged. It seemed that I had stopped her return to the moon; she could no longer escape from the earth. This world was not beautiful, she said, but the moon was beautiful, and life there was rich in meaning. Sometime later she suffered a relapse into her catatonia, and I had to have her taken to a sanatorium. For a while she was violently insane.
When she was discharged after some two months, it was once again possible to talk with her. Gradually she came to see that life on earth was unavoidable. Desperately, she fought against this conclusion and its consequences, and had to be sent back to the sanatorium. Once I visited her in her cell and said to her, ‘All this won’t do you any good; you cannot return to the moon!’ She took this in silence and with an appearance of utter apathy. This time she was released after a short stay and resigned herself to her fate.
For a while she took a job as nurse in a sanatorium. There was an assistant doctor there who made a somewhat rash approach to her. She responded with a revolver shot. Luckily, the man was only slightly wounded. But the incident revealed that she went about with a revolver all the time. Once before, she had turned up with a loaded gun. During the last interview, at the end of the treatment, she gave it to me. When I asked in amazement what she was doing with it, she replied, ‘I would have shot you down if you had failed me!’
When the excitement over the shooting had subsided, she returned to her native town. She married, had several children, and survived two world wars in the East, without ever again suffering a relapse.
What can be said by way of interpretation of these fantasies? As a result of the incest to which she had been subjected as a girl, she felt humiliated in the eyes of the world, but elevated in the realm of fantasy. She had been transported into a mythic realm; for incest is traditionally a prerogative of royalty and divinities. The consequence was complete alienation from the world, a state of psychosis. She became ‘extramundane,’ as it were, and lost contact with humanity. She plunged into cosmic distances, into outer space, where she met with the winged demon. As is the rule with such things, she projected his figure onto me during the treatment. Thus I was automatically threatened with death, as was everyone who might have persuaded her to return to normal human life. By telling me her story she had in a sense betrayed the demon and attached herself to an earthly human being. Hence she was able to return to life and even to marry.
Thereafter I regarded the sufferings of the mentally ill in a different light. For I had gained insight into the richness and importance of their inner experience. (128-30)
I would point out that this woman’s story, odd as it may seem to our rational side, is not so unusual as we like to think. Art – even popular art – is filled with stories equally strange (hers is actually better and more coherent than most). Why is it that human beings are so attracted to such stories? Because we enter into their world every night when we sleep, and our brains are much more involved in such weird fantasies than we like to pretend. Indeed, the more rationalistic our lives, the more power such fantasies will have over us – as we see in young people whose interest in science and science fiction/fantasy is equal. And a glance at some of the highest-grossing films of all time shows that they resemble this woman’s fantasy world far more than they resemble the mundane lives of the people who watch them.
The realization that insanity was not so distant from the common run of experience refined Jung’s clinical work, which was defined by two key characteristics. First, he was convinced that psychic phenomena are real: to say “it’s all in your head!” or “it’s just psychological” located the phenomenon, but did not for him in any way diminish its reality. Lies, misunderstandings, fantasies, misrememberings, delusions, hallucinations, errors, and dreams he did not treat as bad data so much as another data-set which could be used to reach other (at times quite useful) conclusions. “My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning” (110). This conviction sounds simple enough but very few people live by it: Jung inserts as an example a lengthy description of four mosaics he saw at Ravenna, which he describes in great detail, but do not exist in any physical form. He had misremembered them, but that in itself does not make them any less important to him. (Occasionally I find it useful to write without checking my facts, for the same reason; it gives you a transcript of events not as they occurred but as your psyche stored them for its own purposes). Second, he refused all medical detachment: he believed that he as a doctor should be as affected by the patient as the patient by the doctor; in other words, he did not believe in relating to them as doctor to patient but as person to person.
In any thoroughgoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play. There are many cases which the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help. (133)
As a doctor I constantly have to ask myself what kind of message the patient is bringing me. What does he mean to me? If he means nothing, I have no point of attack. The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. ‘Only the wounded physician heals.’ But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect. I take my patients seriously. Perhaps I am confronted with a problem just as much as they. It often happens that the patient is exactly the right plaster for the doctor’s sore spot. (134)
The result of this conviction for Jung was personal development and growth, and one of the things most clear from his autobiography is how remarkable a life he had: all kinds of people spoke honestly to him as they spoke to no one, and like Odysseus “he knew their minds.” He knew intimately lunatics, murderers, artists, scholars, the great as well as the unknown. His entire life he investigated something he knew he never understood; and hence his knowledge grew and grew and grew. The ideal he set for himself, because he found it so curative for his patients, he called individuation. As with so many Jungian terms it is a bit misleading. It does not primarily mean “being an individual,” though this might well be one of its side effects. He uses it in its strict Latin meaning, “becoming undivided” (Latin is in general very useful for understanding Jung; as he himself notes – alas for the days when people really learned from their fathers: “As it happened, I had known Latin since I was six, because my father had given me lessons in it” (43)). In this case integration is probably the right English word. It means to accept no divisions in your life – your profession, your marriage, your dreams, your home, your emotions, your friendships, your religion, your ideals, your reasons should be given some kind of relationship to each other and to the whole of which they are a part. He gives interesting examples of telling his patients his dreams; and using his dreams to make decisions (imagine how we would mock someone of importance if they did such a thing – showing our absolute contempt for dreams). The opposite of integration is neurosis – when he defines as “being divided against oneself.”
One of the techniques he found most integrating was the creation of images; again this is his term, and it means more than just making pictures. The Christian way of putting it would be that everything he found inside he attempted to incarnate in external reality . “Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation,” he says, and this is for him the sum of our fate, and the only options are volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt. Everything interior requires what alchemy called the krater, the vas, the Grail, the “vessel of transformation,” the thing which can receive the seed; fulfillment was this union of idea and vessel. For Jung this image-making could be as simple as saying what he felt needed to be said; but he also painted (images from his dreams, images of his ancestors, etc.); built over the course of his lifetime a small castle, towers and all (which looks extraordinary; you would think it was five hundred years old, built of stone, not a mid-twentieth century building); sculpted; carved monumental Latin and Greek quotations onto rocks; and kept a most impressive secret book (his “Red Book”), written in a superb calligraphic hand and extensively illuminated. As with much “therapeutic art” the quality of his production is not always of the highest: he wrote a very bombastic “Seven Sermons to the Dead” expounding some of his religico-mystico thoughts, which is both interesting and an embarrassment. But his house looks utterly fascinating and is a reproach to the whole disastrous twentieth century in architecture. It looks like the outgrowth of a full life, rather than the cheapness, barrenness, and conformity that most people have to endure as their surroundings.
You can see why artists have found Jung so fascinating, and the completeness of his life resembles Goethe, whom he quotes incessantly. And like Goethe one of his most remarkable qualities is wisdom. At times his dicta are entirely counterintuitive and shockingly original but no less insightful for that: “It frequently happens that women who do not really love their husbands are jealous and destroy their friendships. They want the husband to belong entirely to them because they themselves do not belong to him. The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love” (137). In his book Answer to Job, which during his lifetime aroused a firestorm of incomprehension and outrage, he claimed that the Crucifixion was necessary so that God could atone for His sin toward us, because the only way we could accept God is if we put on Him the suffering he so unjustly afflicted us with. (I will devote another essay to Jung’s religious thought, which is absolutely unique and passionate and Christianis suo modo Christianior).
It was the encounter with Freud which really set Jung on the path toward personal wisdom. Those interested in Freud should take a look at Jung’s analysis of him, which is incisive and takes up an entire chapter. The sum of it is this:
Freud himself had a neurosis, no doubt diagnosable and one with highly troublesome symptoms, as I had discovered on our voyage to America. Of course he had taught me that everybody is somewhat neurotic, and that we must practice tolerance. But I was not at all inclined to content myself with that; rather, I wanted to know how one could escape having a neurosis. Apparently neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his own neurosis. (166-7)
Intriguingly, one of the common opinions held in psychiatric circles is that Jung specifically failed in this quest: that in fact the more he gave himself over to this process of integration, the crazier he became. He gave up his university post and began painting pictures, carving Greek inscriptions, building castles, writing sermons to the dead, turning theology on its head, etc. He lived much of the latter half of his life without electricity or running water. Again, it is easy to see why artists have felt more kinship with him than doctors have. But his legacy is most impressive – the twenty-volume Princeton edition of his works shows bewildering breadth. His essays range from “The Reaction-Time Ratio in the Association Experiment” (still a most useful technique), “The Analysis of Dreams,” “A Contribution to the Psychology of Rumor” and “On the Significance of Number Dreams” to “Woman In Europe,”“What India Can Teach Us,” “Gnostic Symbols of the Self,” essays on flying saucers, Picasso, Wotan, Adam and Eve, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon,” “The Origin of the Hero,” “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”, a foreword to the I Ching, and on and on – not to mention the things he is famous for, such as his theory of archetypes or the unconscious. It appears that his sacrifice of bourgeois-professional respectability for the life he had was well worth it, not only for posterity which has benefited from his work but for himself; his book confirms what the many members of the Jung circle – Marie-Lousie von Franz, Joseph Campbell, Helen Luke, Heinrich Zimmer (all interesting figures in their own right, and I’m sure there are many more) – all proclaim loudly, that Jung was possessed of a warmth and generosity and wisdom that created life all around him.
Part of the risk Jung took in achieving this was religious. He was as fascinated by the God-experience as any other experience, and he found it fundamental to the psyche, by whatever name it goes by (for the appearance of scientific objectivity he appears to call God “the Self,” just as historians now try to pretend they do not date everything from Christ’s birth by using “C.E.” and “B.C.E.”): it was the image of wholeness and completeness and order.
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep. Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his church, to live the ‘symbolic life.’ We need only think of the experience of the Mass, of baptism, of the imitatio Christi, and many other aspects of religion. But to live and experience symbols presupposes a vital participation on the part of the believer, and only too often this is lacking in people today. In the neurotic it is practically always lacking. In such cases we have to observe whether the unconscious will not spontaneously bring up symbols to replace what is lacking. But then the question remains of whether a person who has symbolic dreams or visions will also be able to understand their meaning and take the consequences upon himself. (140)
Hence the question of religion becomes medically unavoidable: “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness” (340). But we live in a society in which a doctor would almost never have the courage to trangress the rules of bourgeois respectability – secularism being one – and engage on this level.
The decisive question for man is: is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as our personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship. (325)
This is almost the sum of the work of Dostoevsky, who was obsessed with this question; all of his characters are efforts to express this problem.
Jung spends much of the latter part of the autobiography discussing what he thinks our contact with the infinite is. His religious ideas, as I have said, deserve another essay, but in sum he is a Christian who is hard on Christians. His take is this: because Christianity has not absorbed the modern age effectively, it is not an image of wholeness – hence a defective or for many people entirely inoperable God-image (while Christians may scoff at the notion, they would probably accept it applied to another religion, say Islam). His claim is that Christianity is “of central importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit. Otherwise, it stands apart from the times, and has no effect on man’s wholeness” (210). (The only person he felt was doing this effectively (curiously enough) was Pius XII, who had the courage to enunciate a new Church dogma). This would not be the first skin the Christian serpent has had to shed; but this rebirth appears to be more difficult than most. My intuition here indicates that almost all of the things Church conservatives consider threats – science, Biblical deconstruction, freedom of conscience, sexuality, emancipation of women, and especially relativism – can easily be assimilated into the religious view, given courage. I do not know how this will happen on an institutional level; the institutions of today are terribly entrenched and very difficult to change. For the most part, the only way to get institutions to deal with truth has been to start new institutions. But one starting point is to go on the quest oneself; and Jung offers an excellent example of a man who wrestled with God until he was given answers. He enunciates the problem in the middle of his life thus:
And promptly there arose the question of what, after all, I had accomplished. I had explained the myths of peoples of the past; I had written a book about the hero, the myth in which man has always lived. But in what myth does man live nowadays? In the Christian myth, the answer might be. ‘Do you live in it?’ I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. ‘For me it is not what I live by.’ ‘Then do we no longer have any myth?’ ‘No, evidently we no longer have any myth.’ ‘But then what is your myth – the myth in which you do live?’ At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end. (171)
Let us all be such as not to stop at these dead ends in life, but like Jung let us not let God go until He has blessed us.
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