by C. G. Jung
All in all, this was the one great experience which wiped out all my earlier philosophy and made it possible for me to achieve a psychological point of view. I had discovered some objective facts about the human psyche. Yet the nature of the experience was such that once again I was unable to speak of it. I knew no one to whom I could have told the whole story. Once more I had to lay aside an unfinished problem. It was not until two years later that my dissertation appeared.4
At the medical clinic Friedrich von Müller had taken the place of old Immermann. In Müller I encountered a mind that appealed to me. I saw how a keen intelligence grasped the problem and formulated questions which in themselves were half the solution. He, for his part, seemed to see something in me, for toward the end of my studies he proposed that I should go with him, as his assistant, to Munich, where he had received an appointment. This invitation almost persuaded me to devote myself to internal medicine. I might have done so had not something happened in the meantime which removed all my doubts concerning my future career.
Though I had attended psychiatric lectures and clinics, the current instructor in psychiatry was not exactly stimulating, and when I recalled the effects which the experience of asylums had had on my father, this was not calculated to prepossess me in favor of psychiatry. In preparing myself for the state examination, therefore, the textbook on psychiatry was the last I attacked. I expected nothing of it, and I still remember that as I opened the book by Krafft-Ebing5 the thought came to me: “Well, now let’s see what a psychiatrist has to say for himself.” The lectures and clinical demonstrations had not made the slightest impression on me. I could not remember a single one of the cases I had seen in the clinic, but only my boredom and disgust.
I began with the preface, intending to find out how a psychiatrist introduced his subject or, indeed, justified his reason for existing at all. By way of excuse for this high and mighty attitude I must make it clear that in the medical world at that time psychiatry was quite generally held in contempt. No one really knew anything about it, and there was no psychology which regarded man as a whole and included his pathological variations in the total picture. The director was locked up in the same institution with his patients, and the institution was equally cut off, isolated on the outskirts of the city like an ancient lazaret with its lepers. No one liked looking in that direction. The doctors knew almost as little as the layman and therefore shared his feelings. Mental disease was a hopeless and fatal affair which cast its shadow over psychiatry as well. The psychiatrist was a strange figure in those days, as I was soon to learn from personal experience.
Beginning with the preface, I read: “It is probably due to the peculiarity of the subject and its incomplete state of development that psychiatric textbooks are stamped with a more or less subjective character.” A few lines further on, the author called the psychoses “diseases of the personality.” My heart suddenly began to pound. I had to stand up and draw a deep breath. My excitement was intense, for it had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.
My violent reaction set in when Krafft-Ebing spoke of the “subjective character” of psychiatric textbooks. So, I thought, the textbook is in part the subjective confession of the author. With his specific prejudice, with the totality of his being, he stands behind the objectivity of his experiences and responds to the “disease of the personality” with the whole of his own personality. Never had I heard anything of this sort from my teacher at the clinic. In spite of the fact that Krafft-Ebing’s textbook did not differ essentially from other books of the kind, these few hints cast such a transfiguring light on psychiatry that I was irretrievably drawn under its spell.
The decision was taken. When I informed my teacher in internal medicine of my intention, I could read in his face his amazement and disappointment. My old wound, the feeling of being an outsider and of alienating others, began to ache again. But now I understood why. No one, not even I myself, had ever imagined I could become interested in this obscure bypath. My friends were astounded and put out, thinking me a fool for throwing up the enviable chance of a sensible career in internal medicine, which dangled so temptingly before my nose, in favor of this psychiatric nonsense.
I saw that once again I had obviously got myself into a side alley where no one could or would follow me. But I knew—and nothing and nobody could have deflected me from my purpose—that my decision stood, and that it was fate. It was as though two rivers had united and in one grand torrent were bearing me inexorably toward distant goals. This confident feeling that I was a “united double nature” carried me as if on a magical wave through the examination, in which I came out at the top. Characteristically, the stumbling block that lurks in the path of all miracles that turn out too well tripped me up in the very subject in which I really excelled, pathological anatomy. By a ridiculous error, in a slide which apart from all sorts of debris seemed to contain only epithelial cells, I overlooked some molds hiding in a corner. In the other subjects, I had even guessed what questions I would be asked. Thanks to this, I cleared several dangerous reefs with flying colors. In revenge, I was then fooled in the most grotesque way just where I felt most certain of myself. Had it not been for this I would have had the highest mark in the examination.
As it was, another candidate received the same number of points as I did. He was a lone wolf, with a personality quite opaque to me and suspiciously banal. It was impossible to talk to him about anything except “shop.” He reacted to everything with an enigmatic smile, which reminded me of the Greek statues at Aegina. He had an air of superiority, and yet underneath it he seemed embarrassed and never quite fitted into any situation. Or was it a kind of stupidity? I could never make him out. The only definite thing about him was the impression he gave of almost monomaniacal ambition which precluded interest in anything but sheer facts. A few years afterward he became schizophrenic. I mention this as a characteristic example of the parallelism of events. My first book was on the psychology of dementia praecox (schizophrenia), and in it my personality with its bias or “personal equation” responded to this “disease of the personality.” I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be “normal.” It is a coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the therapist, both in principle equally subjective. My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning.
The evening after my last examination I treated myself—for the first time in my life—to the longed-for luxury of going to the theater. Until then my finances had not permitted any such extravagance. But I still had some money left from the sale of the antiques, and this allowed me not only a visit to the opera but even a trip to Munich and Stuttgart.
Bizet intoxicated and overwhelmed me, rocked me on the waves of an infinite sea. And next day, when the train carried me over the border into a wider world, the melodies of Carmen accompanied me. In Munich I saw real classical art for the first time, and this in conjunction with Bizet’s music put me in a springlike, nuptial mood, whose depth and meaning I could only dimly grasp. Outwardly, however, it was a dismal week between the first and the ninth of December, 1900.
In Stuttgart I paid a farewell visit to my aunt, Frau Reimer-Jung, whose husband was a psychiatrist. She was the daughter of my paternal grandfather’s first marriage to Virginia de Lassaulx. She was an enchanting old lady with sparkling blue eyes and a vivacious temperament. She seemed to me immersed in a world of impalpable fantasies and of memories that refused to go home—the last breath of a vanishing, irrevocable past. This visit was a final far
ewell to the nostalgias of my childhood.
On December 10, 1900, I took up my post as assistant at Burghölzli Mental Hospital, Zürich. I was glad to be in Zürich, for in the course of the years Basel had become too stuffy for me. For the Baslers no town exists but their own: only Basel is “civilized,” and north of the river Birs the land of the barbarians begins. My friends could not understand my going away, and reckoned I would be back in no time. But that was out of the question, for in Basel I was stamped for all time as the son of the Reverend Paul Jung and the grandson of Professor Carl Gustav Jung. I was an intellectual and belonged to a definite social set. I felt resistances against this, for I could not and would not let myself be classified. The intellectual atmosphere of Basel seemed to me enviably cosmopolitan, but the pressure of tradition was too much for me. When I came to Zürich I felt the difference at once. Zürich relates to the world not by the intellect but by commerce. Yet here the air was free, and I had always valued that. Here you were not weighed down by the brown fog of the centuries, even though one missed the rich background of culture. For Basel I have to this day a nostalgic weakness, despite the fact that I know it no longer is as it was. I still remember the days when Bachofen and Burckhardt walked in the streets, and behind the cathedral stood the old chapter house, and the old bridge over the Rhine, half made of wood.
For my mother it was hard that I was leaving Basel. But I knew that I could not spare her this pain, and she bore it bravely. She lived together with my sister, a delicate and rather sickly nature, in every respect different from me. She was as though born to live the life of a spinster, and she never married. But she developed a remarkable personality, and I admired her attitude. She had to undergo an operation that was considered harmless, but she did not survive it. I was deeply impressed when I discovered that she had put all her affairs in order beforehand, down to the last detail. At bottom she was always a stranger to me, but I had great respect for her. I was rather emotional, whereas she was always composed, though very sensitive deep down. I could imagine her spending her days in a Home for Gentlewomen, just as the only sister of my grandfather had done.
With my work at Burghölzli, 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. For six months I locked myself within the monastic walls in order to get accustomed to the life and spirit of the asylum, and I read through the fifty volumes of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie from its very beginnings, in order to acquaint myself with the psychiatric mentality. I wanted to know how the human mind reacted to the sight of its own destruction, for psychiatry seemed to me an articulate expression of that biological reaction which seizes upon the so-called healthy mind in the presence of mental illness. My professional colleagues seemed to me no less interesting than the patients. In the years that followed I secretly compiled statistics on the hereditary background of my Swiss colleagues, and gained much instruction. I did this for my personal edification as well as for the sake of understanding the psychiatric mentality.
I need scarcely mention that my concentration and self-imposed confinement alienated me from my colleagues. They did not know, of course, how strange psychiatry seemed to me, and how intent I was on penetrating into its spirit. At that time my interest in therapy had not awakened, but the pathological variants of so-called normality fascinated me, because they offered me the longed-for opportunity to obtain a deeper insight into the psyche in general.
These, then, were the conditions under which my career in psychiatry began—the subjective experiment out of which my objective life emerged. I have neither the desire nor the capacity to stand outside myself and observe my fate in a truly objective way. I would commit the familiar autobiographical mistake either of weaving an illusion about how it ought to have been, or of writing an apologia pro vita sua. In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others.
1 Die Suggestion und ihre Heilwirkung (Leipzig and Vienna, 1888).
2 “With downcast eyes they marched back to the land of the Philistines. O dear, O dear, O dear, how things have changed!”
3 Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89) compared Christ’s coming to the shunting of a railroad train. The engine gives a push from behind, the motion passes through the entire train, and the foremost car begins to move. Thus the impulse given by Christ is transmitted down the centuries.—A. J.
4 Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phänomene: eine psychiatrische Studie (1902); English trans.: “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena,” in Psychiatric Studies (CW 1).
5 Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, 4th edn. (1890).
• IV •
Psychiatric Activities
THE YEARS at Burghölzli were my years of apprenticeship. Dominating my interests and research was the burning question: “What actually takes place inside the mentally ill?” That was something which I did not understand then, nor had any of my colleagues concerned themselves with such problems. Psychiatry teachers were not interested in what the patient had to say, but rather in how to make a diagnosis or how to describe symptoms and to compile statistics. From the clinical point of view which then prevailed, the human personality of the patient, his individuality, did not matter at all. Rather, the doctor was confronted with Patient X, with a long list of cut-and-dried diagnoses and a detailing of symptoms. Patients were labeled, rubber-stamped with a diagnosis, and, for the most part, that settled the matter. The psychology of the mental patient played no role whatsoever.
At this point Freud became vitally important to me, especially because of his fundamental researches into the psychology of hysteria and of dreams. For me his ideas pointed the way to a closer investigation and understanding of individual cases. Freud introduced psychology into psychiatry, although he himself was a neurologist.
I still recollect very well a case which greatly interested me at the time. A young woman had been admitted to the hospital, suffering from “melancholia.” The examination was conducted with the usual care: anamnesis, tests, physical check-ups, and so on. The diagnosis was schizophrenia, or “dementia praecox,” in the phrase of those days. The prognosis: poor.
This woman happened to be in my section. At first I did not dare to question the diagnosis. I was still a young man then, a beginner, and would not have had the temerity to suggest another one. And yet the case struck me as strange. I had the feeling that it was not a matter of schizophrenia but of ordinary depression, and resolved to apply my own method. At the time I was much occupied with diagnostic association studies, and so I undertook an association experiment with the patient. In addition, I discussed her dreams with her. In this way I succeeded in uncovering her past, which the anamnesis had not clarified. I obtained information directly from the unconscious, and this information revealed a dark and tragic story.
Before the woman married she had known a man, the son of a wealthy industrialist, in whom all the girls of the neighborhood were interested. Since she was very pretty, she thought her chances of catching him were fairly good. But apparently he did not care for her, and so she married another man.
Five years later an old friend visited her. They were talking over old times, and he said to her, “When you got married it was quite a shock to someone—your Mr. X” (the wealthy industrialist’s son). That was the moment! Her depression dated from this period, and several weeks later led to a catastrophe. She was bathing her children, first her four-year-old girl and then her two-year-old son. She lived in
a country where the water supply was not perfectly hygienic; there was pure spring water for drinking, and tainted water from the river for bathing and washing. While she was bathing the little girl, she saw the child sucking at the sponge, but did not stop her. She even gave her little son a glass of the impure water to drink. Naturally, she did this unconsciously, or only half consciously, for her mind was already under the shadow of the incipient depression.
A short time later, after the incubation period had passed, the girl came down with typhoid fever and died. The girl had been her favorite. The boy was not infected. At that moment the depression reached its acute stage, and the woman was sent to the institution.
From the association test I had seen that she was a murderess, and I had learned many of the details of her secret. It was at once apparent that this was a sufficient reason for her depression. Essentially it was a psychogenic disturbance and not a case of schizophrenia.
Now what could be done in the way of therapy? Up to then the woman had been given narcotics to combat her insomnia and had been under guard to prevent attempts at suicide. But otherwise nothing had been done. Physically, she was in good condition.
I was confronted with the problem: Should I speak openly with her or not? Should I undertake the major operation? I was faced with a conflict of duties altogether without precedent in my experience. I had a difficult question of conscience to answer, and had to settle the matter with myself alone. If I had asked my colleagues, they would probably have warned me, “For heaven’s sake, don’t tell the woman any such thing. That will only make her still crazier.” To my mind, the effect might well be the reverse. In general it may be said that unequivocal rules scarcely exist in psychology. A question can be answered one way or another, depending on whether or not we take the unconscious factors into account. Of course I knew very well the personal risk I was running: if the patient got worse, I would be in the soup too!