Yet more Jung

Mary Foote’s private life was far more complex and worthy of serious description than it is usually accorded by those who study the history of analytical psychology or write about the life of Jung. In that sense, she is representative of many other women who came to Zurich at this time and remained for the rest of their lives to become important players in Jung’s. Foote’s family ungraciously described them and her as most other commentators on Jung’s jungfrauen have done, as women “with female problems who, like a lot of other sentimental-mystical crones, got in over [their] head and relaxed by attaching to the doctor.”"’ Such descriptions admittedly touch upon some of the personal difficulties in these women’s lives, but they totally ignore their intellectual abilities and achievements. Thornton Wilder, who sought Jung’s counsel shortly after his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize, had a much kinder view of the women whose lives were centered around analytical psychology than is usually accorded them. He saw them as women “whose melancholy gentleness seems to allude to the fact that life has been unjust and unkind.”

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 Jung did not respond specifically to this possibility, but he used it to make the comparison of
how different the English were from Americans:

In England you have to be careful not to make educated mistakes. You must look up everything you are going to mention. . . . Don’t ever make that kind of mistake in England, because they will catch you at once. Now, in the U.S., it won’t matter. Don’t worry about it, because they wouldn’t know the difference, most of them. But and this is important Americans have a 6th sense for the genuine. Don’t ever, ever, ever say anything for the effect of it if you are not absolutely certain, because they will catch you up on it.

Jung told her, “The American sixth sense for the something real is the reason they have discovered me, While Europeans have yet to do so.”

The other point he wanted to make concerned the anima within men. He said men could not work with him or become his friends because “they have a harder time accepting their anima than women [do in accepting their animus].” He said he could only get along with men who had established solid and respectable careers in other fields, because other psychologists always became

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Soon she began to analyze her own dreams, but she “got in a mess” and asked Jung to take her on as a patient. He agreed to take her free of charge if she would prepare translations from Latin and Greek alchemical texts in exchange. Naturally, she accepted. Jung told her his interest in alchemy sprang from the realization that everything within his own fantasies that he thought was personal was really anchored in a long historical tradition. Mythology had not given him the answers he sought; nor had his forays into comparative religions such as Gnosticism, Manicheism, and others. He was convinced that a study of the historical development of alchemy would result in parallels with his own spiritual development, and if so, would provide a logical extension from which he could generalize to treat patients. Jung planned to study alchemical manuscripts not because he wanted to find the secret of how to create literal gold, but, rather, because he sensed that the search of the ancient alchemists for transformation paralleled his modern one for successful individuation.

Thus, von Franz the still-teenage girl became the recipient of confidences Jung had hitherto told no one but Toni Wolff. He told von Franz he had been collecting information about alchemy for the previous decade, independent of but coinciding with meeting the eminent Sinologist Richard Wilhelm and reading his translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower. Jung told von Franz that that book provided the bridge between the dead end of Gnosticism and the great unknown represented by alchemy. To explain further, he told her how puzzled he had been by the dream of an American analysand who dreamt he was an eagle that ate his own feathers and fell to death in the desert. On his next visit to the British Museum, his excitement was palpable when he found “the so-called Ripley Scroll,” in which there is an alchemical representation of an eagle eating his own feathers. Von Franz insisted that this was the first time she heard Jung describe the process he later defined as “synchronicity.”