by Eric Wargo
Again, to explain the scarab incident there is no need to appeal to some transpersonal domain of electric archetypes; nor is it helpful to invoke the “intense desire” of Carl Jung. Maggy Quarles van Ufford dreamed of a scarab because the next day, her myth-obsessed doctor would hand her a rose chafer and deliver an exciting, learned discourse on the significance of the scarab in Egyptian religion—a profoundly meaningful and rewarding moment in her life. It was thus Maggy’s own precognitive brain, not Jung’s “very creative, very strong mind” 44 (as Beitman puts it), that created that meaningful moment … and that gave Jung his most enchanting story. Thanks to Vicente de Moura’s research, we can now give credit where credit is due.
But Beitman is correct that Jung “completed the coincidence” 45 by opening the window and handing the beetle to his astonished patient. This illustrates not only the time-looping nature of precognition but also the important fact that its rewards are very often social experiences, confluences of two (or more) lives that enfold and entwine in some profound and seemingly fateful way. J. B. Priestley observed how the future-influencing-present effect often manifests especially around romantic connections. 46 As Freud noted in his debunking of Frau B.’s premonitory dream, “accidents which seem preconcerted … are to be found in every love story.” 47 If precognition serves a social orienting function, we might look for it to manifest particularly strongly in situations where a desired romantic connection is impeded, either by physical separation or social taboo. 48 Therapeutic contexts, with their powerful and (usually) not-acted-upon transference and countertransference feelings, ought to be the perfect cloud chamber in which to capture time loops. And indeed, it appears that the scarab incident was just one part of a larger “precognitive seduction” of Jung by Maggy.
Cupid’s Causal Arrows
De Moura revealed that Maggy was also the patient Jung described at length in “The Realities of Practical Psychotherapy,” a very interesting and suggestive lecture he delivered in Bern, Switzerland in May, 1937 but never published. 49 Here as in the scarab case, Jung affected clinical detachment and pretended to find Maggy boring … at least at first. This patient wore her rationalism like an armor, he said, parrying his efforts at opening her to the irrational, to the mysteries, with deft ripostes from Kant and Schopenhauer, all the arsenal of her extensive education and reading. He described that she had a “compulsive argumentativeness and … fondness for philosophical hair-splitting that was quite intolerable despite her high intelligence.” 50 Jung described that her unconscious world also had a somewhat impenetrable Oriental flavor, exotic and deeply out of synch with Europe, which he surmised must have been the product of her early childhood and the Malay ayah , or wet nurse, who had suckled and cared for her in the first years of her life.
It was in this lecture that Jung described how this 25-year-old woman came to him after seeing two other analysts unsuccessfully, having dreamed in both cases of being at a frontier train station gazing into an impenetrable dark forest—the dreams mentioned earlier in this chapter. Jung interpreted the forest as her unconscious, into which her therapists were not equipped to guide her. Jung asked his patient if she had had a similar dream when she started treatment with him; she “gave an embarrassed smile” and related the following dream:
I was at a frontier station. A customs official was examining the passengers one by one. I had nothing but my handbag, and when it came to my turn I answered with good conscience that I had nothing to declare. But he said, pointing to my handbag: “What have you got in there?” And to my boundless astonishment he pulled a large mattress, and then a second one, out of my bag.” She was so frightened that she woke up. 51
If this had been Freud’s clinic in Vienna and Jung had been his erstwhile mentor who saw sex organs in everything, the sexual meaning of an authority figure pulling things out of her handbag (not to mention the railway setting) would have been clear enough. The fact that it was a “customs official” doing the pulling might have also pointed toward its being a sexual wish aimed at Jung himself, perhaps also a wish to be delivered of a child by him. What was Jung, the famous anthropologist of the soul, but a kind of “customs official”? Likely it was clear to Jung, but perhaps he was just being delicate in interpreting it to his patient ( he reported) as a dream of a disguised bourgeois wish for a conventional marriage (the mattresses being “marriage beds”; it may indeed have been Jung she wished to marry). Maggy strongly resisted this interpretation. Although she was seeing a very nice respectable man that she loved—probably Adam Reichstein (the lawyer son of her landlady Gustawa Reichstein 52 ), whom she later did marry—she fiercely did not want to wed … that is, unless Jung himself compelled her to. Would he compel her to? (She wanted to be forced.) Not possible, he insisted. 53
We can read between the lines here that it is nothing other than Maggy’s transference love for her doctor that accounts for her protest at his suggestion that she really wanted to marry her boyfriend. Jung’s description of the verbal outpouring from Maggy that ensued is almost Lovecraftian in its hyperbolic allusiveness to his patient’s primeval sexual wantonness, reinforcing the impression that she was trying to seduce her doctor. It certainly seems to have had the desired effect at arousing his interest:
Behind these resistances, it then turned out, there was hidden a most singular fantasy of a quite unimaginable erotic adventure that surpassed anything I had ever come across in my experience. I felt my head reeling, I thought of nymphomaniac possession, of weird perversions, of completely depraved erotic fantasies that rambled meaninglessly on and on, of latent schizophrenia, where at least the nearest comparative material could be found. 54
According to Jung, what followed was several weeks of therapeutic impasse—maybe even embarrassed silence. Maggy said nothing of interest, perhaps ashamed of her divulgence of her wild sex fantasies, and Jung could make no headway … until one night, Jung himself had the vivid dream mentioned earlier, about Maggy sitting high atop a castle tower far above his head, so that he had to bend his head all the way back to see her up there, “golden in the light of the evening sun.” 55 He awoke with the lines from Schenkenbach in his head, about the Virgin Mary. Again, if it had been Freud, he would have had no trouble admitting this bending his head all the way back and the tall tower were phallic, sexual symbols.
Thanks to remarks Jung made a decade later to his protégé, the English analyst Peter Baynes, we know that his feelings toward Maggy indeed went beyond Platonic admiration for her ideas and her interesting mandalas. Jung admitted deep attachment to his Dutch patient and even described her to Baynes as “the ideal anima-woman.” 56 “Animawoman” is Jung-speak for a kind of intellectual and erotic muse. 57 There is no evidence, either in the material de Moura has made available or in Jung’s writings, that Jung transgressed ethical bounds with Maggy, as several biographers have suspected him to have done with other female patients. 58 But—and this indeed is the main thrust of his 1937 lecture—Jung did argue that if he was to help this patient break out of her too-rationalistic shell, he himself needed to walk the dangerous path of giving her more than the stony and impenetrable silence that was Freud’s preferred method and that has been the standard of psychoanalytic practice since then. Thus, instead of concealing his dream from Maggy, he divulged it to her, “with the result that the superficial symptomatology, her argumentativeness, her insistence on always being right, and her touchiness vanished.” 59
Here Jung’s description of the effect of his intervention—this time by telling his own dream—is almost a clone of the response he says his offering her the scarab provoked: softening her extreme “masculine” rationalism. 60 In fact, since this lecture was written over a decade before his works on synchronicity, the cloning would have gone in reverse: This 1937 narrative of therapeutic epiphany, unpublished and languishing in his desk drawer, may be the source or template for the scarab story. 61 It is because of the similarity between the two accounts that I surmise the scarab incident
likely occurred around the same time, early in her therapy when she was still relatively closed off to the irrational and Jung felt frustrated with her treatment—thus probably in 1920.
Jung relates that his divulgence of his feelings toward his patient triggered an unfolding series of baffling—and sometimes, though he did not say so outright in his paper, erotic—physical symptoms in Maggy: “They first took the form of an indefinable excitation in the perineal region, and she dreamt that a white elephant was coming out of her genitals. She was so impressed by this that she tried to carve the elephant out of ivory….” The symptoms migrated then to her uterus, requiring a referral to a gynecologist (“an inflamed swelling … about the size of a pea, which refused to heal … and merely shifted from place to place”), then to her bladder (“She had to leave the room two or three times during the consulting hour. No local infection could be found.”), after which it went to her intestines (“causing gurgling noises and sounds of splashing that could be heard even outside the room” as well as “explosive evacuations of the bowels”). Then, after these symptoms abated, Maggy developed a fantasy “that the top of her skull was growing soft … and that a bird with a long sharp beak was coming down to pierce through the fontanelle as far as the diaphragm.” 62
And here’s where it gets really interesting. Coincidentally—or the later Jung might have said, synchronistically—it was only Jung’s encounter, right at this time, with the book The Serpent Power by Sir John Woodroffe, writing under the pen name of “Arthur Avalon,” that enabled him to explicate Maggy’s symptoms for her. This volume, published in 1918 by the Theosophical Publishing House, introduced the West to Kundalini yoga and included descriptions of the chakra system that closely matched the symptoms Maggy was producing. The base chakra, Jung learned in Woodroffe’s book, is symbolized by an elephant, corresponding to her dream. The second, sexual chakra is symbolized by a Leviathan-like water monster, “symbol for the devouring and birth-giving womb.” And so on. 63
Jung was puzzled and amazed at this correspondence. He acknowledges the unlikelihood that Maggy had somehow, as a toddler in the Orient, imbibed a whole sophisticated Tantric symbology—an intimate understanding of the body’s chakra system, as well as knowledge of the sexual serpent Kundalini that rested at its base—from that illiterate Malaysian ayah of hers. Maggy could not remember her young childhood or even a word of Malay. Even Jung, who timidly draws out a few parallels between the chakra system and Western philosophy, admits his perplexity and does not glibly chalk it up to the collective unconscious. We must of course give Jung the benefit of the doubt here, that Maggy herself was not reading The Serpent Power concurrently, which would have invalidated his lecture (a lecture that Maggy’s younger sister Mischa attended, in fact). 64 But given what we already know about Maggy’s dream-precognition, it seems perfectly possible that her bodily symptoms, along with their associated dreams and fantasies like the elephant coming out her genitals, precognitively (or presentimentally) anticipated the doctor’s learned explication, based in this case on his imminent or concurrent reading. It would be a case of “feeling her future” not just with her dreams but with her whole body, in what looks very much like a hysterical seduction, a kind of erotic performance. 65 Jung notes that Maggy found her bizarre symptomatology not unpleasurable but exciting.
That precognition could be somatized this way—as a Kundalini serpent’s dance of tantalizing, strange symptoms wending their way up Maggy’s chakras, tied to the rewards of her doctor’s learned explication, which was in turn based on a (to him) exciting new book about Eastern religion—is a natural extension of J. W. Dunne’s insights about the relationship between precognitive dreams and imminent learning experiences. It also is a natural extension, I think, of the findings in presentiment research. Like Daryl Bem’s study participants tending to accurately pick a curtain on a computer monitor that would reveal an erotic photo, or like Dean Radin’s subjects displaying heightened arousal before seeing emotionally stimulating pictures, Maggy seems to have been “presponding” to future stimuli in Jung’s consulting room with her body as well as her dreams. Her inflammations and excitations and “gurgling noises” may have been, in effect, the real-life equivalent of Tyrone Slothrop’s premonitory erections in Gravity’s Rainbow .
Richard Noll’s critical take on the collective unconscious assumes a fascinating new dimension when we consider the possible role of precognition as the mysterious X factor in our engagement with symbols materially encoded in culture—for instance, in popular spiritual books. The precognitive episodes in Maggy’s treatment suggest the possibility that at least some of what Noll quite reasonably assumed was cryptomnesia may really have been pro mnesia—the production of mythological motifs in dreams and fantasies as a precognitive orientation toward exciting learning experiences ahead in Jung’s clinic. In other words, it may not have been necessary for a patient to have read about some mythological motif before producing it in a dream or fantasy if Jung was going to fascinatingly supply the meaning during the next session. As I suggested previously, the precognitive unconscious cannot know the meaning of what it is producing; the meaning only emerges when a dream or fantasy or behavior is interpreted in light of subsequent events. 66 Jung would naturally have interpreted such productions by his patients as evidence that his favorite mythological motifs had a universal and transpersonal significance.
Another experience several years later in Maggy’s therapy, in which she again precognized something Jung was reading and was going to tell her about, further supports such a possibility. In a letter probably sent in 1930, Maggy, whose surname was now Reichstein, reminded Jung of dreams anticipating the birth of her two children a few years earlier. Those dreams by themselves are not necessarily compelling as evidence of precognition, as married women of childbearing age may be liable to have such dreams and are also liable to become pregnant. But in the same letter, she also reminded her former doctor of another dream that bore the same coincidental, if not exactly “synchronistic,” relationship to her next visit with him that the scarab dream did. This one had a much more explicitly erotic overtone, reflecting the powerful transference feelings Maggy clearly had still felt toward him while she was being treated. It also turned out to be about a book on Jung’s bookshelf.
In the letter (which de Moura reproduces in his article), Maggy recalled that she had dreamed she was resting in bed, when Jung’s spirit visited her “from the afterlife,” bending down and kissing her. His kiss held “something very vital,” which, she wrote, would bring “an improvement of my condition.” 67 Maggy wrote that she brought this dream to her next session, and Jung told her that before she had arrived, he had been with another patient but had felt the inexplicable urge to cut that session short, and then did so. He said that after his patient left, he pulled down a book at random from his bookshelf and opened it to a story about a sick man who had a vision of his dead wife, along with another person who had conducted her soul to him from the afterlife. The resemblance of this story to Maggy’s dream was obvious.
At that point, Maggy recalled in her letter, Jung dozed briefly—they had been seated next to each other. He then awoke to tell her a second story from the same book, which he had forgotten about. In that story, a clergyman was visited by a sick woman but felt powerless to help her. The same evening, the clergyman dozed while thinking about the woman, and the next day he received a letter from her thanking him for visiting her in spirit form during the evening—a visit which “gave her a sense of extreme well-being.” 68 This story also closely resembled Maggy’s dream.
De Moura suggests that the book Jung had consulted in this instance may have been none other than Phantasms of the Living —Jung had two copies on his shelf, the original and a German translation—but notes that neither story (as Maggy recalls them) matches exactly any of the stories in that book. 69 It is possible that it was a different book, or there may be a “telephone game” effect here—Maggy’s letter was asking for cla
rification on a memory several years removed, of a story told by another person. It could even be that Jung changed or embellished the story when telling it to her; at this great distance, there is no telling. But whether Jung recounted the stories accurately or not does not matter. The point is that Maggy seems to have dreamed in advance of another moment in her treatment. As in the scarab incident, it was her dream that prompted Jung’s divulgence—making it another time loop. And once again, as with her “Kundalini” symptoms and dreams, this one centered on one of her doctor’s imminent reading experiences—or really, his excited sharing of it. The erotic nature of the dream hints yet again at a fascinating precognitive dimension of the transference relationship that few clinicians have even begun to explore. 70
We do not know what context or issue Maggy Reichstein was dealing with at that point in her life, but clearly this episode made enough of an impact on her that she reminded her former doctor of it in a letter years later. The fact that what Jung bore her in the dream was “very vital” may be another dream pre-presentation of this event’s significance for her. What was “vital” in it may have been simply the amazing-unsettling-rewarding emotional mélange that time loops always provoke in us bears of little brain. 71
According to de Moura, Maggy remained in treatment with Jung through the mid-1920s but continued to take inspiration from him and remained in his circle long after her treatment was over. She debated with him, corresponded with him, painted mandalas (she was regarded as a gifted artist and became known in his inner circle as the “Mandala Lady”), translated his works into Dutch, and influenced him in other ways until the end of his life (he died in 1961). Even though she remained anonymous in his writings, Jung privately credited her with awakening him to Eastern philosophy and religion. “I learned a lot from you,” he wrote in one 1929 letter. 72 Maggy died in 1975, at 81.