by Ruth Snowden
Eventually Jung’s independent way of thinking led to a rift with Freud in 1913. Following this rift, Jung resigned from his presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and then fell into a state of psychic depression and disorientation, at times verging on psychosis. This state was to haunt him for the next five or six years. He found it difficult to cope with everyday life, but he was determined to confront whatever was emerging from his unconscious. For a time he gave up public appearances, and even his academic career, resigning his lectureship at Zurich in order to concentrate on his self-analysis. Interestingly, the work he did on himself during this dark time was to lead him to some of his most important insights (see Chapter 3). In fact, he later said that all his work, all his creative activity, stemmed from dreams and fantasies that came to him during this period.
Jung saw military service in 1918 as Commandant at Chateaux d’Oex, a camp for British interns. During this time he began drawing mandalas, which are archetypal symbols found in many religions and other aspects of many cultures. These helped him to understand his psychic transformations from day to day and to emerge at last from his period of inner darkness.
* * *
Insight
A mandala is a symbolic, circular figure that often represents the universe, balancing energies, or the wholeness of the Self.
* * *
From 1918 until 1926 Jung studied the Gnostic writers, philosophers who lived during the period 100–300 CE and were concerned with occult mystical knowledge and the world of the unconscious. However, in the end Jung decided they were too remote to form a real link with his current work.
Jung continued to develop his own school of psychology. After the First World War, he travelled widely and studied the cultures and beliefs of tribal communities in places such as America, Africa and India. In 1928 he began reading alchemical texts and found concepts in them that excited him enormously because they confirmed many of his own ideas about how the human psyche transforms and develops. Here, at last, was the link he had been searching for, connecting the past and Gnosticism to the future and modern psychology. He researched alchemical studies for many years before finally publishing some of his findings in the 1930s and 1940s.
In 1936, when Harvard University marked its tercentenary by awarding honorary degrees to the most eminent living scientists, Jung was one of the people chosen. During the 1930s he also received doctorates from Oxford, two universities in Switzerland and three in India. His reputation had grown gradually and he had become a leader of international research work in psychology, partly because he eagerly exchanged ideas with others.
In 1933, Jung became president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, an organization based in Germany, which was soon to be heavily influenced by Nazi thinking. Jung became increasingly uncomfortable about this emphasis and his link to the organization, coupled with work that he was currently doing about racial theories of the unconscious, led to widespread criticism and accusations of anti-Semitism. In 1939, he finally resigned from the organization (see Chapter 10).
In 1943, Jung was made Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Basel, but the following year he suffered a heart attack and had to retire from his post. But he was still busy thinking and writing – many of his most important works were written during the years that followed. Even in old age, he was still known as a great conversationalist, able to have informed discussions about a wide range of different topics. His charismatic personality meant that he attracted a huge following, but after his wife died in 1955 he began to shy away from the public eye. He died in 1961.
Jung’s private life and personality
Jung, like most of us, was a man with contradictory sides to his personality. When a portrait of him was made in the 1930s by an anonymous woman, he said that it was not quite right, and that indeed it would be extremely difficult to get it right, because his spirit was not apparent in his external appearance. In fact he saw himself as a ‘clash of opposites’. From early childhood, Jung had observed similar conflicting characters in his mother. Emilie Jung, neé Preiswerk, was a large, kindly, motherly figure – she was a good cook and a ready listener, and had hidden literary talent. But there was another mother, an uncanny figure, who seemed to emerge at night. This mother was mysterious and ruthless, rather frightening in fact, and represented a more primitive kind of person altogether.
Despite the apparent maternal capability of his mother, Jung never felt particularly close to her and seems to have been reluctant to confide in her fully. Young Carl was a sensitive child and soon picked up on the ongoing conflict between his parents. This conflict was reflected in his inner world later on in life, as he struggled to reconcile the very different world views presented to him by his parents. From childhood onwards he saw himself as having two different aspects to his personality, which he labelled Number 1 and Number 2. (For more about this, see Chapter 2.) His own complex psychological make-up is very much reflected in his theories of psychology, which are frequently concerned with the integration of opposites to make a meaningful whole. People who knew him well also observed that there seemed to be two different Jungs. On the one hand there was the modern, intellectual Jung, who drove around Zürich in a red car and grappled with problems of the psyche in his book-lined study. On the other hand there was the primitive Jung, who built himself a medieval-looking, fairy-tale tower by the lake at Bollingen. Here he would retreat in his spare time, living close to nature, crafting wood and stone, cooking, and doing his washing by hand. He would play for hours out of doors, tinkering with stones and water. Some people saw this as very odd behaviour for a distinguished professor.
Jung was always full of zest and enthusiasm, whatever he was doing: he was renowned for his loud wholehearted laugh. He was an open person too, always expressing his feelings both with his friends and in everyday life, and quite willing to admit to his own shortcomings. The down side to this openness was a foul temper which, on occasion, burst forth. Aniela Jaffé, his friend and administrative secretary, describes how difficult this could be to cope with at times, but generously attributes it to his bossy Leo temperament and his extreme sensitivity, both of which enriched and burdened his life.
Jung’s physical appearance matched his personality – he was tall and well built and many people found him physically attractive, especially women. He met his wife, Emma Rauschenbach (1882–1955) when he was just 21 and she was 16. The first time they met she was standing at the top of a staircase, and Jung had an immediate premonition that she was to be his wife. They were indeed married seven years later, in 1903, and their first child Agathe was born in 1904. Over the next ten years they had four more children, three more girls and a boy: Gret (born 1906), Franz (born 1908), Marianne (born 1910) and Helene (born 1914).
The children were given a liberal upbringing for the times. They were raised as Christians, but Jung also taught them different religious ideas, told them stories that fired their imaginations and encouraged them to find their own career paths. He allowed time to play with them, particularly while the family was on holiday. They often slept in tents, gathering their own firewood and water from the lake, and messing about in boats. Jung also encouraged their creativity using the natural resources of water, wood and stone that he loved himself.
At first the growing family lived in rooms at the Burghölzli hospital, but in 1909 they were able to move into a newly built house on the lakeside at Kusnacht near Zürich. Jung had known from very early childhood that he wanted to live near a lake. Luckily for him, Emma was a woman of substance, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, so this left Jung free to pursue his own interests a lot of the time.
Emma Jung worked as an analyst in the therapy practice, taking on her own patients. She also gave lectures at the Jungian institute in Zürich. She was especially interested in Arthurian legends, and made a special study of the Grail Legend. Antonia Wolff also worked alongside Jung and became his mistress from about 1911 onwa
rds. The relationship between Jung and his two women became a complex triangular one that must have been very difficult for both the women. Jung himself was happy with it and fatly announced that a man needed two women – one to organize the domestic affairs and one to be stimulating to the intellect! In fact, he was quite a womanizer and had various other affairs in addition to his relationship with Antonia.
Jung outlived both his beloved women and missed them in his last years. He carved memorial stones for each of them, with Chinese inscriptions. Emma’s said, ‘she was the foundation of my house’ and Toni’s said, ‘she was the fragrance of the house’. He never wrote a great deal about people who were close to him, probably mainly in order to protect them.
Jung travelled extensively, visiting places as far apart as North Africa, New Mexico, East Africa (Kenya and Uganda) and India. He lectured in both Britain and America. People usually described Jung as being friendly and interested, but he had odd moods when he would become preoccupied, even rude. At these times he would withdraw from society and escape to his tower at Bollingen. When the mood took him, he was totally driven by the need to indulge in creative activity or study, which meant that he sometimes hurt people or made enemies because he appeared distant.
All his life Jung had a strong belief in God, and insisted that regaining a religious attitude was the ultimate challenge for everyone. But he rejected dogma and fixed religious views, saying that understanding God had nothing to do with going to church or sticking to a particular creed. In his view, God needs mankind in order to mirror his creation and help it to unfold and grow. But rather than God being totally in charge, this is a two-way process, with man as co-creator. Jung saw a person’s task in life as being the integration of the self, and the reconciliation of opposites in the psyche. He strongly emphasized the importance of myth, which appears in all cultures throughout recorded history, because it can act as a guide to show us the evolutionary path we are supposed to follow.
Jung died in 1961 after a brief illness. All his life he had been interested in the connections between what we think of as the ‘outer’ world and our own inner energy. For him all things had life – he was even known to give names to his pots and pans. He had lived in what many people saw as two separate worlds – the practical, earth-rooted world of nature, and the mysterious, numinous world of spirit. Nowadays, many people recognize that the two worlds are actually part of a great whole, as modern physics and esoteric psychology are beginning to bridge the apparent gap. Many of Jung’s ideas that seemed odd at the time are now beginning to make a lot of sense.
* * *
Insight
Esoteric knowledge is to do with the inner world. This is another Greek word, esoterikos meaning ‘within’. It is sometimes used to refer to secret or mystical knowledge, revealed only to a chosen few. Exoteric knowledge, on the other hand, is widely-known, public stuff, to do with the outer world.
* * *
* * *
THINGS TO REMEMBER
Jung’s early religious upbringing and his great love of nature especially influenced his later thinking.
Jung was married and had five children.
He saw himself as having two personalities, one analytical and the other intuitive. From this, he came to realize that integration of the different facets of the personality is an important life task.
Although Jung was often regarded as an eccentric, he gradually acquired a huge following and became famous all over the world.
He was a charismatic man, but at times he could be moody and difficult to live with.
Jung saw a person’s task in life as being the integration of the self and the reconciliation of opposites in the psyche.
* * *
2
Jung’s early life
In this chapter you will learn:
in more depth about Jung’s childhood and early career
about some major influences on his thinking
the background to Jung’s important relationship with Freud.
Boyhood
In his autobiographical book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which was written near the end of his life, Jung recalls various important incidents from his childhood. Some of these were to have profound effects upon his later thinking and haunt him all his life. From very early childhood, he particularly remembered scenes that occurred in the nearby cemetery, where men would arrive dressed in long, black frock coats and tall hats, carrying a black box. His father would speak in a solemn voice, women would weep, and then they would bury someone in the ground. Understandably, when young Carl was told that Lord Jesus had taken these buried people to himself, he developed a great mistrust of Jesus. At about the same time in his childhood he encountered a Jesuit priest, whose sombre black-robed figure terrified the boy. He began to associate religion with feelings of fear and foreboding, and consequently began to hate going to church.
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 philosophical and religious questions, many of which were very sophisticated for his age. His country playmates and other children he began to encounter at school 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. He found his games totally absorbing and could not bear to be observed by other people. When he was with other children he would behave in a very different way, joining in their pranks, and even making up some of his own, which he never felt the need to do at home.
A childhood friend describes the young Carl as being very antisocial and quite unlike any other child he had met. When he and Carl were left alone to play together, Carl totally ignored him, absorbed in a game of ninepins all by himself in the middle of the room. Later in life, Jung 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.
JUNG’S EARLIEST RECOLLECTED DREAM
When he was three or four, Jung dreamed that he was in a meadow not far from home, where he came upon a dark, stone-lined hole with steps leading down underground. He went down, hesitantly and full of fear, until he came to a doorway, closed off by a green curtain. Pushing this aside, he entered a large underground chamber where there was a wonderful golden throne. Seated upon this throne was a huge thing made of flesh, 4.5–5.5 m high and about 0.5 m thick. On top it had a rounded head, with a single eye gazing upwards. He was paralyzed with terror and, as he stood transfixed, he heard his mother’s voice telling him, ‘that is the man-eater’. At this point he woke up, terrified and sweating.
It was only years later that Jung realized that the huge thing of flesh was a phallus. The dream was oddly un-childlike and sophisticated – where had the anatomically correct phallus, sitting on a throne like some subterranean god, come from? Eventually he connected his dream with a book he read about the motif of cannibalism underlying the symbolism of the Christian Mass ceremony. He realized that the phallus in his dream was a ritual phallus, similar to those encountered in ancient religions. He was puzzled as to how a child could have had knowledge of such esoteric matters – 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.
THE STONE
When he was aged between seven and nine, Jung often played near a wall made of large blocks of stone. He had a fascination for starting little fires in hollows in this wall. He felt that the fires were in some way sacred, and had to be kept fed so that they would burn forever. 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 which was being sat upon. 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, 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
Gradually, Jung began to be aware that he had two personalities, which he privately called ‘Number 1’ and ‘Number 2’. The very different influences from his parents probably had a lot to do with creating this dualism in Jung’s psyche.
Number 1 was the socially adapted part of him, concerned with dutifully coping with the external, everyday world as best as he could. This side of Jung was ambitious and analytical, looking at the world from a scientific point of view and studying things by breaking them down into their separate elements.
Number 2 was much older, secretive and mysterious and tended to look at things in an intuitive way, knowing things without having to reason them out. This was the part of him that felt close to nature and to God. This inward-looking aspect of his psyche felt essentially more real to him.
Jung clearly felt this duality in himself from an early age. When he was about ten, he carved a 5-cm manikin from the end of a ruler. The manikin wore a frock coat, top hat and shiny black boots. Jung sawed him off and 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 River Rhine, which he painted to divide it into upper and lower halves. The manikin and his sacred stone were secret and he knew that they somehow represented aspects of himself. Jung hid them on a beam in an attic where he was forbidden to play because the floorboards were unsafe.