by Ruth Snowden
As a hospital psychiatrist, Jung specialized in working with psychotic patients. This experience inspired an interest in personality development and he realized that a person’s symptoms often make sense in the light of their individual story. Sigmund Freud was an important early influence on Jung but differences in their thinking, especially about the nature of the unconscious, led to a rift between them.
After his rift with Freud, Jung went through a long period of depression, withdrawing into his own inner world. He found that his troubled dreams and visions were connected to ideas expressed in myths, and so he began to develop his theories about the collective unconscious and ‘archetypes’.
BOYHOOD
Because Jung played alone a great deal when he was a child, he became introspective and developed a rich and imaginative inner world. His later work as an analyst and a great thinker had its roots here. Young Carl spent a lot of time pondering over philosophical and religious questions, many of which were very sophisticated for his age. His country playmates were fun to be with, but he felt that they alienated him from his true self – he was only able to be truly himself when he played alone. Later in life he remarked that he felt he needed people both more and less than others did. He found people fascinating, but he also needed a lot of personal space.
In his autobiographical book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written towards the end of his life, Jung recalls various important incidents from his childhood. Some of these were to have profound effects and haunt him all his life, as detailed below.
THE STONE
When he was aged between seven and nine, Jung played often near a wall made of large blocks of stone. He had a fascination for starting little fires in hollows in this wall. The fires were in some way sacred, and had to be kept fed so that they would burn for ever. In front of the wall was a slope with a stone in it that jutted out so that you could sit on it. Jung would play a game where he would alternate between being himself sitting on the stone, and being the stone that was being sat on. After a while he would become uncertain of reality and would stand up wondering ‘who was what now’. This confusion was exciting and interesting, and was always accompanied by ‘a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness’. This was one of his first experiences of the numinous (awe-inspiring, indicating divine presence), which was to become of paramount importance to him in later years. The stone, in fact, was to become one of the foundations of his analytical psychology.
THE SECRET MANIKIN
When he was about ten, Jung carved a 5-centimetre manikin from the end of a ruler. The manikin wore a frock coat, top hat and shiny black boots. Jung made him a home in a wooden pencil case, complete with a little bed for him to lie on. He added a smooth black stone from the Rhine River, which he painted to divide it into upper and lower halves. The manikin and his sacred stone were secret and Jung hid them on a beam in the attic, where he was forbidden to play because the floorboards were unsafe.
Whenever he was upset or there was an undercurrent of trouble between his parents, Jung would sneak up to look at the manikin. Each time he visited, he added a tiny scroll, written in a secret language and bearing an important message. The secret manikin and the stone gave him a sense of power and security that was so important that he considered them to be the ‘essential factor’ of his boyhood. He knew that they represented an enormously important secret and this was his first real attempt to give shape to it.
Jung saw his whole life as an unfolding of ‘the self-realization of the unconscious’. He felt that what he referred to as a person’s ‘personal myth’ could express that person’s inner world more precisely than science ever could. The manikin in the attic was somehow symbolic of his own inner world as a child – it was a part of his own evolving personal myth. Although in old age Jung’s recollections of the external world had faded, his encounters with the ‘other reality’ were as vivid as ever. These were what really mattered to him and he seems to have been aware of this fact from an early age.
JUNG’S EARLIEST RECOLLECTED DREAM
When he was three or four, Jung dreamed that he was in a meadow, where he came across a dark stone-lined hole with steps leading down underground. He went down and there, in an underground chamber, was a wonderful golden throne. Seated on this throne was a huge thing made of flesh, 4.5–5.5 metres high and about half a metre thick. On top it had a rounded head, with a single eye gazing upwards. He was paralysed with terror and as he stood transfixed he heard his mother’s voice telling him ‘that is the man-eater’.
It was only years later that he realized that the thing had been a phallus. The dream was oddly un-childlike and sophisticated – where had the anatomically correct phallus, sitting like some subterranean god, come from? It was not until he was about 50 years old that he connected it with a book he read about the motif of cannibalism underlying the symbolism of the Mass. He was puzzled as to how a child could have had knowledge of things that were to fill his later years with ‘stormiest passion’. Jung maintained that his intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings when he had that dream.
JUNG’S FIRST EXPERIENCE OF A NEUROSIS
Jung describes having an early personal insight into the process of forming a neurosis. When he was 12 years old he was pushed over by another boy and banged his head. After that he began to have fainting fits whenever school or work were mentioned. He was kept off school for six months and enjoyed rambling around alone, living with nature and communing with his inner world. All the while his pleasure was somewhat spoilt by a vague sense of guilt. Eventually he overheard his father talking to a friend and telling him how worried he was about his son’s future. Jung rushed off and began to study his Latin books, struggling every few minutes to overcome giddy spells. Within a few weeks he was back at school and had the uncomfortable realization that he had engineered the whole thing himself. From then on he worked hard. As he walked to school one day, he suddenly felt as if he had emerged from a dense cloud. He thought to himself, ‘Now I am myself’.
EDUCATION
Jung was nevertheless bored by school, feeling that it took up too much of his valuable time. Many subjects he found almost too easy and did very well in them. However, he objected strongly to algebra and found maths as a whole to be ‘sheer terror and torture’. Divinity he found ‘unspeakably dull’, despite his interest in religious questions. He had an ‘utter incapacity’ for drawing, and gymnastics was ruined for him by physical timidity and the fact that he resented people telling him how to move. Meanwhile, as he was growing up he had an enduring sense of inferiority, feeling himself to be somehow contemptible.
Jung was largely unpopular with his schoolmates, who thought him to be snobbish and a swot. He struggled with the feeling of an inner split in his personality, which seemed to force him to try and live in two very different worlds at once. Partly because of this, he felt unable to decide what to study at university. Eventually he won a scholarship to study medicine at Basel University. Being at university made Jung feel alive and he made plenty of friends. He read books on philosophy as well as medicine, and he joined the university debating society where they discussed the human soul and other religious questions.
Jung felt a great wave of excitement when he first came across a book called Text-book of Psychiatry, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Krafft-Ebing spoke of the subjective nature of psychiatry, describing how the psychiatrist studied his patient with the whole of his own personality. Jung realized with a flash of illumination that here, at last, was a way in which he could integrate the two currents of his internal world. This was where science and the spiritual met.
JUNG’S INTEREST IN SPIRITUALISM
While he was at university, Jung found a small book on spiritualism and realized that the phenomena described were related to stories that were familiar from his country childhood. Such things as predictive dreams, clocks that stopped at the moment of death, ghosts and table turning fascinated him. His friends, on the other hand, reacted either with t
otal disbelief or with defensiveness, even dread.
When he was home for the summer holidays, an incident occurred that affected Jung profoundly. The family heard a loud crack from the dining room. Rushing there, they found that their circular walnut dining table had split right across, not along a joint but clean through the solid wood. A few weeks later, another deafening cracking sound was traced to a bread knife that lay inside the sideboard; the knife was shattered into several pieces along the blade. The knife had been used at teatime and then put away as normal.
Jung and his mother both felt that there must be some underlying reason for these two strange incidents. A few weeks later he was asked to attend a séance and he decided to go along, thinking that the incidents might be somehow to do with the medium. After that he attended regular seances on Saturday evenings. The medium, who was a young cousin of Jung’s, took on the personality of a woman called Ivenes. Through Ivenes, she relived past life experiences and dramatic love affairs. Eventually Jung lost interest when he discovered that the girl had cooked up some of the evidence in order to impress him. But he felt that the whole experience had been important because it had further aroused his interest in the human psyche.
SCIENTIFIC THINKING AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
In the 1890s, when Jung was a student, psychiatry was in its infancy. People tended to see it as being related to psychical research and spiritualist ideas. These were very much in vogue at the time, and the Society for Psychical Research had been founded in 1882, in Cambridge. At the same time, new scientific understanding of the unconscious was beginning to emerge, pioneered by Sigmund Freud.
The accepted way of thinking in science followed the rules of ‘positivism’, which limits knowledge to things that are directly observable. This approach goes hand in hand with the mechanistic view. The idea behind positivism is straightforward – you simply describe the facts of what you can experience and observe. Anything else is not considered to be science. Positivists also try to make general scientific laws about the ways in which phenomena are related. This approach began in the natural sciences and spread into philosophy. Most psychologists took a positivist stance; meanwhile, psychiatry was also developing, as people became interested in mental illnesses. It was hard to explain these illnesses by means of conventional medicine and mechanistic thinking.
BURGHÖLZLI
In 1900 Jung was appointed as an assistant at Burghölzli, a psychiatric clinic at the University of Zurich, run by Eugen Bleuler. The patients at Burghölzli were mainly psychotic (suffering from severe mental disorder). Jung worked here for nine years, studying schizophrenic illnesses. The mechanistic outlook said that such illnesses were caused by neurological damage or organic disease. However, Freud’s new ideas about the unconscious were beginning to take effect, suggesting that this might not necessarily be the case. Jung was especially interested in experimental psychology and did extensive work using word tests, whereby the doctor gave the patient a word and the patient responded with whatever came first into his or her head. If a noticeable delay occurred then unconscious emotions were probably at work. Jung carefully noted reaction times and responses and found that he could identify ‘complexes’ of related responses. (In psychology, a ‘complex’ is a related group of emotionally charged, unconscious ideas.)
In 1905 Jung was appointed as a senior doctor and lecturer in the medical faculty at the university. He began to move away from experimental psychology because he felt that doctors were too keen on describing symptoms, making a diagnosis and compiling statistics – all manifestations of the mechanistic view. Jung wanted to find out what was going on in the minds of the mentally ill – he was not interested in labelling people. He pointed out that a person’s symptoms of mental illness will often make perfect sense in the light of their individual story. The problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. Jung began to explore the unconscious minds of his patients, using word association or dream analysis, or simply by endlessly and patiently talking. This is where his friendship with Freud became very important.
JUNG AND FREUD
In 1906 Jung sent an account of some of his findings to Freud, whose work on the unconscious interested him and seemed to confirm some of his findings. Freud’s psychoanalytic therapy was aimed at treating mental and nervous disorders. It worked with theories about the unconscious and the ways in which it interacts with the conscious mind. The therapy was based partly on a free-association process very similar to Jung’s work with word association. Freud also worked a great deal with dreams and this aspect of his work also interested Jung.
The younger Jung had to assert his own ideas and identity in the face of the overwhelming presence of Freud.
Freud and Jung got on especially well at first and a kind of father–son relationship developed between them, Freud being nearly 20 years older than Jung. Freud wanted Jung to be his successor and in 1910 he appointed him as the President of the newly formed International Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna. However, problems soon began to arise in their relationship and Jung gradually began to develop new theories of his own. By 1912, Jung was still outwardly struggling to be supportive towards Freud, but he ended up criticizing the basic theories of psychoanalysis.
Jung coined the phrase ‘analytical psychology’ to describe the new ideas that he was evolving and to distinguish them from psychoanalysis. Letters between Freud and Jung became increasingly bitter and sadly, in 1913, their friendship ceased altogether. However, although the relationship between Jung and Freud did end, there is no doubt that Freud was very important in helping Jung to formulate his theories.
JUNG’S MIDLIFE CRISIS
Jung’s lengthy depression might nowadays be called a midlife crisis. He was 39, many of his former friends turned their backs on him, and he gave up his university post. He felt a great sense of disorientation, and seemed to live under a constant inner pressure. His reaction was to turn away from the world for a while and withdraw into his own inner world. Dreams and fantasies became increasingly interesting to him, not only his own but also those of his patients. He could not understand why other doctors were so obsessed with making firm diagnoses and did not seem interested in what their patients had to say.
During his time working at Burghölzli, Jung had begun to realize that many myth-like themes emerged in the dreams and fantasies of the insane. He began to wonder whether it was possible that people carried little snippets of inherited impressions and imagery, stored in myth-like forms. From this idea he began to develop his theories about the collective unconscious and archetypes, and he began to study his own crisis almost as if he were both patient and doctor at the same time. He found references in mythology to heroes who went off on a ‘Nekyia’, or ‘night-sea journey’. This was a very dangerous quest where the hero was likely to be swallowed up by enormous sea monsters or by an all-devouring female, before achieving rebirth. This mythical idea corresponded very closely to what was going on in Jung’s own inner crisis.
Such imaginative ideas are everywhere but, as Jung had already discovered, they are often treated with dread and suspicion when they emerge into consciousness. Indeed, Jung knew all too well from his clinical work how dangerous the unconscious could be, and at times he feared that he might become psychotic like his patients. He found that his family and his work acted as anchors, preventing him from becoming totally ungrounded. However, he still felt lost, without a frame of reference, so began to look around for ways to chart his journey.
CREATIVE PLAY
Jung tried going over all the details of his childhood in order to try and find a cause for his disturbances. He did this twice over, but it seemed to get him nowhere. In the end he decided that the only thing to do was to be less analytical and try submitting to the impulses of his own unconscious. This had interesting results. The first thing that came into his head was a memory of a passionate interest he had had when he was about ten or eleven years old. He had used building blocks to construct little
houses, castles and villages. As this memory welled up he felt very emotional and excited, so he decided to re-enact the childish phase by indulging in similar games. This felt silly at first, but he soon found that it was a good way of getting back in touch with the true essence of himself at that age.
Jung made cottages, a castle, a village and a church. Then one day, walking by the lake, he found a perfect little red stone pyramid, about 4 cm high. He was delighted, realizing that this would make an altar for his church. As he put it in position he was reminded of the phallus dream he had had when he was very little – the strange god seated on his underground throne. He felt immensely satisfied by this.
Every afternoon Jung would play until his patients arrived, and then again in the evening. For the rest of his life he used such creative play as an invaluable therapeutic tool. Whenever he came up against a mental block, he would paint or work at stone carving, and he always found that his ideas would start flowing again. Creative play thus became a very important aspect of Jungian analysis.
DREAMS, VISIONS AND FANTASIES
Jung found that patients would often report their dreams and fantasies to him spontaneously and he would then ask them questions, such as ‘Where does that come from?’ ‘How does it make you feel?’ Interpretations of the dreams and fantasies seemed to follow of their own accord from the patients’ own replies and associations. Once again, Jung deliberately avoided all theoretical rules – he simply tried to help people to understand their own imagery.
Meanwhile, he was also fascinated by his own dreams and he spent a lot of time trying to interpret them, although this was sometimes very difficult. For example, he dreamed of a long row of corpses, each dressed in different clothes going back through the ages right back to a twelfth-century crusader dressed in chain mail. Each corpse in turn stirred and began to come to life as he looked at it. Jung realized that this particular dream was speaking to him about aspects of the unconscious that are handed down from our ancestors and can still stir and come to life in our own psyches. This dream tied in with the ideas that he was developing about archetypes and the collective unconscious.