Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Page 42
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.
I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.
I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people—aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice. Of course I did not always obey it. How can anyone live without inconsistency?
For some people I was continually present and close to them so long as they were related to my inner world; but then it might happen that I was no longer with them, because there was nothing left which would link me to them. I had to learn painfully that people continued to exist even when they had nothing more to say to me. Many excited in me a feeling of living humanity, but only when they appeared within the magic circle of psychology; next moment, when the spotlight cast its beam elsewhere, there was nothing to be seen. I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In this way I made many enemies. A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.
“Shamefully
A power wrests away the heart from us,
For the Heavenly Ones each demand sacrifice;
But if it should be withheld
Never has that led to good,”
says Hölderlin.
This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. Often I felt as if I were on a battlefield, saying, “Now you have fallen, my good comrade, but I must go on.” For “shamefully a power wrests away the heart from us.” I am fond of you, indeed I love you, but I cannot stay. There is something heart-rending about that. And I myself am the victim; I cannot stay. But the daimon manages things so that one comes through, and blessed inconsistency sees to it that in flagrant contrast to my “disloyalty” I can keep faith in unsuspected measure.
Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others, and at the same time much less. When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation.
The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The ordinary undertakings I planned usually had the worst of it—though not always and not everywhere. By way of compensation, I think, I am conservative to the bone. I fill my pipe from my grandfather’s tobacco jar and still keep his alpenstock, topped with a chamois horn, which he brought back from Pontresina after having been one of the first guests at that newly opened Kurort.
I am satisfied with the course my life has taken. It has been bountiful, and has given me a great deal. How could I ever have expected so much? Nothing but unexpected things kept happening to me. Much might have been different if I myself had been different. But it was as it had to be; for all came about because I am as I am. Many things worked out as I planned them to, but that did not always prove of benefit to me. But almost everything developed naturally and by destiny. I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal. And so I am disappointed and not disappointed. I am disappointed with people and disappointed with myself. I have learned amazing things from people, and have accomplished more than I expected of myself. I cannot form any final judgment because the phenomenon of life and the phenomenon of man are too vast. The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or known about myself.
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.
The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is—or seems to me—not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.
When Lao-tzu says: “All are clear, I alone am clouded,” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age. Lao-tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning. The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true. At every level of intelligence this type appears, and its lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or a great philosopher like Lao-tzu. This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.
Appendix I
LETTERS FROM FREUD TO JUNG1
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
April 16, 1909
DEAR FRIEND,
… It is remarkable that on the same evening that I formally adopted you as an eldest son, anointing you as my successor and crown prince—in partibus infidelium—that then and there you should have divested me of my paternal dignity, and that the divesting seems to have given you as much pleasure as investing your person gave me. Now I am afraid that I must fall back again into the role of father toward you in giving you my views on poltergeist phenomena. I must do this because these things are different from what you would like to think.
I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a powerful impression upon me. After your departure I determined to make some observations, and here are the results. In my front room there are continual creaking noises, from where the two heavy Egyptian steles rest on the oak boards of the bookcase, so that’s obvious. In the second room, where we heard the crash, such noises are very rare. At first I was inclined to ascribe some meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were here were never heard again after your departure. But since then it has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special problem. (Not now, either, I add by way of challenge.) The phenomenon was soon deprived of all significance for me by something else. My credulity, or at least my readiness to believe, vanished along with the spell of your personal presence; once again, for various inner reasons, it seems to me wholly implausible that anything of the sort should occur. The furniture stands before me spiritless and dead, like nature silent and godless before the poet after the passing of the god
s of Greece.
I therefore don once more my horn-rimmed paternal spectacles and warn my dear son to keep a cool head and rather not understand something than make such great sacrifices for the sake of understanding. I also shake my wise gray locks over the question of psycho-synthesis and think: Well, that is how the young folks are; they really enjoy things only when they need not drag us along with them, where with our short breath and weary legs we cannot follow.
Now I shall exercise the privilege of my years to turn loquacious and tell you about one more matter between heaven and earth which cannot be understood. A few years ago I took it into my head that I would die between the ages of 61 and 62, which at that time seemed to leave me a decent period of grace. (Today that leaves me only eight years still to go.) Shortly afterward I made a trip to Greece with my brother, and it was absolutely uncanny to see how the number 61, or 60 in conjunction with 1 and 2, kept cropping up on anything that had a number, especially on vehicles. I conscientiously noted down these occasions. By the time we came to Athens, I was feeling depressed. At our hotel we were assigned rooms on the second floor, and I hoped I could breathe again—at least there could be no chance of No. 61. However, it turned out that my room was No. 31 (which, with fatalistic license, I regarded as after all half of 61-62). This wilier and nimbler figure proved to be even better at dogging me than the first.
From that day until very recently the number 31 remained faithful to me, with a 2 all too readily associated with it. But since I also have in my psychic system regions in which I am merely avid for knowledge and not at all superstitious, I have attempted to analyze this conviction. Here it is. My conviction began in 1899. Two events coincided at that time. The first was my writing The Interpretation of Dreams (which, you know, is dated ahead to 1900); the second, my being assigned a new telephone number, which I have to this day: 14362. It is easy to establish the link between these two facts: in the year 1899, when I wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, I was 43 years old. What should be more obvious than that the other figures in my telephone number were intended to signify the end of my life, hence, 61 or 62? Suddenly there appears a method in this madness. The superstition that I would die between 61 and 62 turns out to be equivalent to the conviction that with the book on dreams I had completed my life work, needed to say no more, and could die in peace. You will grant that after this analysis it no longer sounds so nonsensical. Incidentally, the influence of Wilhelm Fliess plays a part in this; the superstitition dates from the year of his attack on me.
Here is another instance where you will find confirmation of the specifically Jewish character of my mysticism. Apart from this, I only want to say that adventures such as mine with the number 62 can be explained by two things. The first is an enormously intensified alertness on the part of the unconscious, so that one is led like Faust to see a Helen in every woman. The second is the undeniable “cooperation of chance,” which plays the same role in the formation of delusions as somatic co-operation in hysterical symptoms or linguistic co-operation in puns.
I therefore look forward to hearing more about your investigations of the spook-complex, my interest being the interest one has in a lovely delusion which one does not share oneself.
With cordial regards to yourself,
your wife and children,
Yours,
Freud.
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
May 12, 1911
DEAR FRIEND,
… I know that your deepest inclinations are impelling you toward a study of the occult, and do not doubt that you will return home with a rich cargo. There is no stopping that, and it is always right for a person to follow the biddings of his own impulses. The reputation you have won with your Dementia2 will stand against the charge of “mystic” for quite a while. Only don’t stay too long away from us in those lush tropical colonies; it is necessary to govern at home.…
With cordial greetings and the hope that you will write me again after a shorter interval this time.
Your faithful
Freud.
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
June 15, 1911
DEAR FRIEND,
… In matters of occultism I have become humble ever since the great lesson I received from Ferenczi’s experiences.3 I promise to believe everything that can be made to seem the least bit reasonable. As you know, I do not do so gladly. But my hubris has been shattered. I should like to have you and F. acting in consonance when one of you is ready to take the perilous step of publication, and I imagine that this would be quite compatible with complete independence during the progress of the work.…
Cordial regards to you and the beautiful house
from Your faithful
Freud
1 Reproduced with the kind permission of Ernst Freud, London.
2 See above, Chap. V, n. 4, p. 149.
3 Cf. Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1953-57), III, pp. 387 f.
Appendix II
LETTERS TO EMMA JUNG FROM AMERICA (1909)
September 6, 1909, Monday
At Prof. Stanley Hall’s
Clark University, Worcester
.… So now we are safely arrived in Worcester! I have to tell you about the trip. Last Saturday there was dreary weather in New York. All three of us were afflicted with diarrhea and had pretty bad stomach aches.… In spite of feeling physically miserable and in spite of not eating anything, I went to the paleontological collection, where all the old monsters, the Lord God’s anxiety dreams of Creation, are to be seen. The collection is absolutely unique for the phylogenesis of Tertiary mammals. I cannot possibly tell you all I saw there. Then I met Jones, who had just arrived from Europe. Around half-past three we took the elevated and rode from 42nd Street to the piers. There we boarded a fantastically huge structure of a steamer that had some five white decks. We took cabins, and our vessel set sail from the West River around the point of Manhattan with all its tremendous skyscrapers, then up the East River under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, right through the endless tangle of tugs, ferryboats, etc., and through the Sound behind Long Island. It was damp and chilly, we had belly aches and diarrhea and were suffering from hunger besides, so we crawled into bed. Early on Sunday morning we were already on land in Fall River City, where in the rain we took the train to Boston and immediately went on to Worcester. While we were en route, the weather cleared. The countryside was utterly charming, low hills, a great deal of forest, swamp, small lakes, innumerable huge erratic rocks, tiny villages with wooden houses, painted red, green, or gray, with windows framed in white (Holland!), tucked away under large, beautiful trees. By 11:30 we were in Worcester. We found the Standish Hotel a very pleasant place to stay, and cheap also, “on the American plan,” as they say here—that is, with board. At six in the evening, after a well-deserved rest, we called on Stanley Hall. He is a refined, distinguished old gentleman close on seventy who received us with the kindest hospitality. He has a plump, jolly, good-natured, and extremely ugly wife who, however, serves wonderful food. She promptly took over Freud and me as her “boys” and plied us with delicious nourishment and noble wine, so that we began visibly to recover. We slept very well that night in the hotel, and this morning we have moved over to the Halls’. The house is furnished in an incredibly amusing fashion, everything roomy and comfortable. There is a splendid studio filled with thousands of books, and boxes of cigars everywhere. Two pitch-black Negroes in dinner jackets, the extreme of grotesque solemnity, perform as servants. Carpets everywhere, all the doors open, even the bathroom door and the front door; people going in and out all over the place; all the windows extend down to the floor. The house is surrounded by an English lawn, no garden fence. Half the city (about a hundred and eighty thousand inhabitants) stands in a regular forest of old trees which shade all the streets. Most of the houses are smaller than ours, charmingly surrounded by flowers and flowering shrubs, overgrown with Virginia creeper and wisteria; everything well tended, clean, cultivated,
and exceedingly peaceful and congenial. A wholly different America! This is what they call New England. The city was founded as long ago as 1690, so it is very old. Much prosperity. The university, richly endowed, is small but distinguished, and has a real, though plain, elegance. This morning was the opening session. Prof. X had first turn, with boring stuff. We soon decamped and took a delightful walk through the outskirts of the town, which is surrounded on all sides by small and minute lakes and cool woods. We were ecstatic over the peaceful beauty of the surroundings. It is refreshing and reviving after the life in New York.…
Clark University
Worcester, Massachusetts
Wednesday, September 8, 1909
… The people here are all exceedingly amiable and on a decent cultural level. We are beautifully taken care of at the Halls’ and daily recovering from the exertions of New York. My stomach is almost back to normal now; from time to time there is a little twitch, but aside from that, my general health is excellent. Yesterday Freud began the lectures and received great applause. We are gaining ground here, and our following is growing slowly but surely. Today I had a talk about psychoanalysis with two highly cultivated elderly ladies who proved to be very well informed and free-thinking. I was greatly surprised, since I had prepared myself for opposition. Recently we had a large garden party with fifty people present, in the course of which I surrounded myself with five ladies. I was even able to make jokes in English—though what English! Tomorrow comes my first lecture; all my dread of it has vanished, since the audience is harmless and merely eager to hear new things, which is certainly what we can supply them with. It is said that we shall be awarded honorary doctorates by the university next Saturday, with a great deal of pomp and circumstance. In the evening there will be a “formal reception.” Today’s letter has to be short, since the Halls have invited some people for five o’clock to meet us. We have also been interviewed by the Boston Evening Transcript. In fact we are the men of the hour here. It is very good to be able to spread oneself in this way once in a while. I can feel that my libido is gulping it in with vast enjoyment …