by Ruth Snowden
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 upon in a secret language and bearing an important message. The secret manikin 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 that this was his first real attempt to give shape to it. Nobody could discover this secret and destroy it, and as long as his secret was safe, the tormenting sense of being divided into two warring halves was gone.
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Insight
I am utterly fascinated by Jung’s account of his secret manikin, because when I was a similar age I too made a small but potent, magical being. Mine was made out of twigs and leaves and hidden in a match-box in the garden under a lilac bush. Just like Jung’s manikin, it was highly secret, powerful and numinous.
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Much later, 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. As an adult, Jung came to realize that this kind of duality and conflict exists in all of us and that our life’s journey involves discovering and integrating the suppressed aspects of our psyche. But as he was growing up, the conflict between his two opposing selves was very difficult, and he felt that he had to keep parts of his true self hidden. He later found parallels in the beliefs of ancient tribal people such as the Australian Aborigines and although in old age Jung’s recollections of events in the external world 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 from an early age.
THE FANTASY CASTLE
As an adolescent Jung indulged, for some months, in an elaborate fantasy as he walked to school in Basel. This was a vision of a wonderful world where he would be totally in charge. There was no school in this world – instead he lived in a castle on a rocky island in the middle of a lake. This could only be accessed by a narrow isthmus, and even that was cut off from the mainland by a broad canal with a wooden bridge over it. The castle had a tall keep and was surrounded by a medieval city, ruled by a mayor and a council of old men. Carl himself was justice of the peace, arbitrator and advisor, and he only came out in public occasionally in order to hold court. The most important part of the fantasy was an amazing secret that only he knew about. The tower of the keep contained a vast copper column or cable as thick as a man’s arm, which extended right from the battlements down into the cellars. At the top were masses of fine filaments extending into the air, which extracted a mysterious spiritual essence from the atmosphere. This was drawn down the copper column into the cellar and transformed into gold. The existence of this process was a vital secret that had to be concealed from the council of elders and even, in a sense, from himself.
This fantasy illustrates the almost unbearable loneliness and isolation that Jung felt during his childhood and adolescence. The tall keep of the castle, almost impossible to reach on its rocky island, shows how he protected his hidden self. He was a deeply spiritual child and yet he was unable to talk to anyone about any of his spiritual experiences – in fact, they had to be kept totally secret like the manikin in his hidden attic. The mysterious copper column, carrying out its hidden process of transformation seems to foreshadow his later fascination with alchemy.
Education
SCHOOL
In 1886, when Jung was 11, he began secondary school in Basel. Here, for the first time, he was among wealthier people and began to be aware of a deep sense of envy. He was seen by other children as a bit odd and unpredictable and was not particularly popular. Teachers found him frustrating too, because he seemed to be very clever when his interest was held, but he refused to compete with his classmates and was sometimes disruptive and made himself appear stupid. Whenever anything went wrong, the finger of blame always seemed to be pointed at him and he was seen as a troublemaker, but in fact he was just being used as a scapegoat. Eventually, when he was 15, a gang of seven boys lay in ambush and attacked him, but he was big and strong by then and, seized by one of his violent rages, he picked up one of the boys by both arms and swung him at the others, knocking several of them off their feet. After that he was left alone!
Jung describes having an early personal insight into the process of forming a neurosis, which developed as a result of his feelings of alienation. When he was 12 years old, he was pushed over by another boy and banged his head. Even as he fell, he heard an inner voice telling him that this would be a good excuse not to have to go to school any more. After that he began to have fainting fits whenever school or work was mentioned. He was kept off school for six months and enjoyed rambling around alone, living with nature and communing with his inner world, but all the time 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. He was afraid that Carl might be epileptic and consequently unable to support himself when he grew up. 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 neurotic episode 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’.
Jung was nevertheless bored by school, feeling that it took up too much of his valuable time. Many subjects he found too easy and did very well in them. However, he objected strongly to algebra, because it proposed ideas that seemed to him to be downright lies, such as A = B, which was a bit like saying like saying sun = moon. In fact, he found maths as a whole to be ‘sheer terror and torture’.
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. This added to the enduring sense of inferiority he suffered as he grew up, feeling himself to be somehow contemptible. Divinity he found ‘unspeakably dull’, and he was still suspicious of the ‘Lord Jesus’ he was taught about at home and at school. His father’s religious instruction to prepare him for confirmation bored him horribly, but he was becoming increasingly fascinated by the concept of God and other religious questions. Here he sensed an unfathomable mystery, the existence of a unique being who was impossible to understand. He tried to discuss these matters with his father, but felt that his father merely repeated to him what he himself had learned, and had no real depth of understanding at all. His father emphasized that all one had to do was to have faith and that too much thinking was dangerous. Young Carl disagreed, and felt that it was important to experience things for oneself in order to find the truth.
Figure 2.1 Maths was sheer terror and torture.
IDEAS ABOUT GOD
When he was about 12 years old, Jung had an experience that was to change his whole attitude to religion. He was walking home from school one gloriously sunny day and saw the roof of the cathedral glittering as the sun shone on the newly glazed tiles. This made him think about how beautiful the world was, and a moment later he was suddenly swamped by an overwhelming feeling of guilt, and he told himself to stop thinking immediately, in case an appalling thought popped into his head and made him commit a frightful sin. He arrived home feeling very worked up, and that night and for the next two nights his sleep was restless and disturbed to such an extent that his mother thought he must be ill. On the third night he awoke sweating with fear, convinced that God was testing him and trying to force him to think something wicked. Finally he could stand it no longer, and mustering all his psychic stre
ngth he willed the dreaded thought to emerge. Then he saw a vision of the cathedral, the blue sky and God sitting above it all on his golden throne, and suddenly, to his amazement, a huge turd fell from under the throne and smashed the whole cathedral to pieces!
Allowing this thought finally to emerge brought Jung an indescribable feeling of relief. He had finally yielded to God’s command and allowed himself to think the unthinkable. Now, of course, there emerged a difficult question – why should God want to befoul his own cathedral in this way? Gradually there came a dim understanding that perhaps there was another aspect to God, a side of him that could be negative and terrible. Years later Jung was to develop this idea much further in his writing, for example in his book Answer to Job. Looking back late in his life, he saw this experience as being of fundamental importance to his whole understanding of the nature of God.
Young Carl was surrounded by people who supposedly knew all about spiritual matters and he frequently listened to their conversations, but all the time he wondered to himself ‘What about the secret?’ He always felt that there was some hidden secret of grace about which his father and uncles knew nothing. Church gradually became a torment to him as he sat and listened to men who presumed to preach aloud about the nature of God, as if they knew what were his real intentions and actions. For him the concept of the reality of God could not be expressed with stale words and rituals. He also felt guilty because he alone had grasped the dual nature of God and knew that God had a nasty side to his nature that wanted him to do things that were wrong.
In vain Jung searched through his father’s library, reading anything he felt might enlighten him further about the nature of God, but even there he found no answers. His only comfort was to sit upon his stone and ponder on the fact that the stone had no uncertainties and stayed eternally the same for thousands of years without experiencing all the angst and emotion that coursed through him. This thought was strangely calming and reassuring.
Between the ages of 16 and 19 Jung’s lengthy sense of depression slowly lifted, but he was still rather unpopular with his schoolmates. He was still struggling with his feeling of an inner split in his personality, which seemed to force him to try to live in two very different worlds at once. Partly because of this he felt unable to decide what to study at university. He was fascinated by natural science – zoology, palaeontology and geology – but felt equally drawn to comparative religion and prehistoric archaeology. Eventually, in 1895, he won a scholarship and went to Basel University to study medicine.
His ‘Number 2’ personality faded for the time being into the background as Jung became occupied with his studies and new social life. Being at University made him really feel alive and he made plenty of friends. He became an avid scholar, reading books on philosophy as well as medicine, and great works of literature such as Goethe’s Faust. He joined the university debating society where they talked about the human soul and other interesting religious questions. His interest in psychic phenomena deepened as he read work by writers such as the theologian, scientist and philosopher Swedenborg (1688–1772) and discovered reports of psychic events in cultures from all over the world.
Jung stopped going to church and had a lot of arguments with his father, who became increasingly depressed and died of cancer during Jung’s first year at Basel. His father’s death seemed to change Jung’s whole personality and he became known as ‘the Barrel’. Suddenly he became loud and sociable, going to parties and dances, sometimes getting drunk, and falling hopelessly and inappropriately in love.
Scientific thinking at the turn of the last 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, England. 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 was based on positivism, which limits knowledge to things that are directly observable. This approach goes hand in hand with the mechanistic view, which says that everything is determined by strictly physical or chemical processes.
The idea behind positivism is simple – you 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 the positivist stance, but psychiatry was also developing at this time, as people became interested in mental illnesses that were hard to explain by means of contemporary medicine and mechanistic thinking.
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Insight
Philosophy is a system of learning that investigates the underlying nature and truth of knowledge and existence. It has a critical, systematic approach, relying on reasoned argument. Positivism is a branch of philosophy that limits knowledge to what is based on actual sense experience. It attempts to affirm theories by strict scientific investigation.
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Jung was aware, even before he turned to psychiatry as his main field of study, that his way of thinking was going to be different from the mainstream and that this independence of thought would at times lead him into frightening isolation. Soon after he began his studies at Basel, he had a dream. It was night-time and he was struggling through a dense fog, battling with a mighty wind. His hands were cupped around a tiny light, which he had to protect from going out. He had a horrible sense of being followed, and glancing behind him saw a gigantic black figure. This filled him with terror, but he realized that as long as he kept the tiny light alive everything would be all right. When he woke up, he recognized the huge black figure as the Brocken Spectre, an optical illusion sometimes seen in mountainous areas, where a vast shadow of the observer is cast onto a bank of mist, looking for all the world like a gigantic black ghost. Jung realized that this spectre was his own shadow, cast by the tiny flickering light that he carried. This light was the light of his own unconscious, which was the only light he had and also the greatest treasure he possessed.
While he was at Basel, Jung joined a student society called the Zonfingia Society, and began to put across some of his unusual ideas. The first paper he presented to the society, called On the Limits of the Exact Sciences, attacked the materialist limitations of current scientific thinking. Later, he suggested that the human soul could be a suitable subject for scientific study even though it existed outside what were perceived as the boundaries of the normal physical world. He suggested that more could be discovered about the soul through studying mediums, hypnosis and phenomena such as sleepwalking.
Jung’s interest in spiritualism
Jung was so interested in the idea of studying psychic phenomena of this kind that he decided to make them the subject of his doctoral thesis. He came upon a small book on spiritualism and realized that the phenomena described were related to stories that were familiar from his country childhood and tales that had been related to him about members of his family. 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 to such ideas either with total 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 through, they found that their circular walnut dining table had split right across the middle, not along a joint, but clean through the solid wood. A few weeks later another deafening cracking sound was traced to a bread knife, which lay inside the sideboard 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 séances on Saturday evenings. The medium, Hélène Preiswerk, was a young cousin of Jung’s, and during séances she took on the personality of a woman called Ivenes. Through Ivenes she relived past life experiences and dramatic love affairs. Jung’s doctoral thesis, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Experiences, used Hélène as a research subject. Eventually Jung lost interest when he discovered that the girl had falsified 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 workings of the human psyche. Hélène’s mediumistic ability had given him some insight into the nature of the unconscious mind. His fellow students teased him about his interest in occult phenomena, but he stuck to his guns and pursued his interest, studying spiritualistic literature and doing experiments in the field. It angered him that contemporary science refused to investigate such phenomena, choosing instead simply to deny their existence.
Jung realized that once more he was being pulled in two directions: science emphasized the investigation of concrete facts, whereas philosophy and comparative religion placed importance on the spiritual side of life. However, it seemed to Jung that both disciplines fell short of the truth: science was unable to give a sense of meaning, and religion lacked objective empiricism. For a long time he was unable to decide what to concentrate on in his studies, so he felt a great wave of excitement when he first came upon a book about psychiatry by Krafft-Ebing. Krafft-Ebing spoke of the subjective nature of psychiatry, describing how the psychiatrist studied his patients with the whole of his own personality.