Jung's attitude marked the start of his turning away from using individual analysis to evolve theory and turning instead toward general psychic problems and historical correspondences. Rather than writing up patient histories as a means of establishing treatment models, he now wanted to concentrate on archtypes within the collective unconscious.
To protect himself from the onslaught of both Swiss supplicants and international visitors, Jung devised an analytic technique that became a hallmark of his therapy, even though it was initially formulated to cater first to his personal needs and only secondarily to those of his patients. He wanted time to write and private space in which to think, which usually meant spending long periods in Bollingen. To distance himself from patients and their problems and ensure this degree of privacy, he began to rely on his closest associates to take over treatment and complete the therapy. Patients would see Jung for varying periods of time, some as short as a single visit or a week or two, some for as long as a year. In the latter case, Jung usually saw them for an hour one to four times each week, but he saw most patients twice a week. Often, and usually to suit his schedule rather than theirs, he would interrupt the therapy to accommodate his vacations or professional engagements, or to finish a lecture or meet a publication deadline.
When he turned the case over to one of his associates, he might see the patient occasionally but more often would rely on progress reports during the earliest version of what was later codified as training analysis. With very few exceptions, this method worked well for all the participants.
Another convention that evolved during this time was that patients were analyzed not only by Jung but also by an associate whose sex was the opposite of theirs: men worked with women analysts, while women.
Adela Jaffe’, later Jung’s secretary, collaborator, and editor of the conversations that became Memories, Dreams, Reflections, remembered her own “unconventional analytic hours,” which always took place in the large library adjacent to the study and overlooking the lake. She tried to explain Jung’s “method” by recalling one of her first sessions. He did not wait for her to speak, but as soon as she entered, he took a “very precious” book about alchemy down from his shelves, “the Mutus Liber, a picture book with no text, published . . . in 1677.” It was the flrst alchemical book Jaffe’ had ever seen, and as the hour ended, she realized they had passed it not talking about her concerns but only “looking at its pictures and talking about alchemy.” Many years later, she credited this sort of hour with greater “lasting influence” than those passed in more traditional therapy. As an example ofJung’s ability to “find the truth in the face [of every analysand],” she described a session when she tried to tell him about her mother and he cut her off abruptly, saying, “Don’t waste your time.”
When she wrote to Jung about her plan and included a copy of her journal) his outrage was monumental. He said her description of how he worked gave him “such a headache” that he could not read it in its entirety: “I was so deeply impressed by the abysmal stupidity of my ‘method’ that it would be suicidal if I put my ‘placet’* to it.” But he liked and respected Mary Briner, so he tried to explain what offended him most:
It is absolutely impossible for you to know about the background to and the motivation of the things I say, no matter how accurate your report is. The over & undertones are inevitably lacking. The task you set to yourself is based on your own premice [sic]. You assume, as one generally does, thatI follow a certain method. That is a great mistake. I have no method at all, when it comes to the individual case. When I am speaking or writing about what I do, then I abstract from all my individual experience of what happens in an analysis and I construct a method for the purpose of teaching.
Jung agreed that she had presented a “sufficient picture” of how she “experienced” his analytic action:
But it would demand an almost superhuman genius who could paint a picture of what I am doing. . . . In your representation I am really absent, i.e., an insipid verbal cloud replaces the psychological fact: I am. The cloud does not even represent your total experience much less my part in the game. I may be wrong, but I did not even get a breath of all the nuances and subtleties of intonations and gesture, not to speak of the ever present and most influential unconscious background.
*placet: from the Latin placeo, -ere: “to be pleased with,” “to agree with” or “accept.”
JUNG FELT free to shift the focus of his intellectual inquiry after he read Richard [Wilhehn’s 1929 German translation of the Chinese alchemical text The Secret of the Golden Flower. It was almost as if Wilhelm’s book provided the imprimatur for him to make public something he had been keeping almost sheepishly hidden, his concentrated study of alchemy. Wilhelm’s book offered a model for lung to coalesce the particular combination of philosophy, medicine, and reli’ 'gion that eventually defined his canon. Jung reasoned that if a scholar of Wilhelm’s standing could study esoteric texts and publish his findings, then he could turn a deaf ear to Toni Wolff’s concern that the world would brand him a charlatan if he embraced alchemy, which she thought at best a pseudoscience, at worst sheer quackery.
In Jung’s milieu, those unfamiliar with alchemy as it was practiced in the late Middle Ages generally ridiculed the process as a misguided chemical attempt to create gold from base metal or other dross and dismissed the alchemist’s search for a universal elixir or a philosopher’s stone as even greater foolishness. TOQ/ Wolff worried that Jung would be lumped in with the worst practitioners of th . so-called black magic or mumbo jumbo; Jung could not persuade her that the ’ ancient alchemical texts dealt more with the internal, personal experiences of the alchemists filled as they were with references to spiritual transformations -than with accounts of their laboratory procedures. When Jung read the ancient alchemical works, he found interesting parallels between their writers and many of the texts created by religious mystics, anchorites, and other vision~ aries, particularly within the Christian tradition. To him, alchemy was more about the process of internal growth that he called individuation, and as such, it became his metaphor for the process of transference within the analytic ent counter as it evolved within his psychology.
As always, the texts of the Protocols, blunt and earthy, do more to explain this evolution than does the polished account of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. While the published biographical text delineates fact and event in serene and orderly development, the interviews and conversations within the Protocols tell just how roundabout, haphazard, and lengthy was the questing and seeking that led to Jung’s ultimate realization that alchemy was what had been missing all along from his study of archetypes and the collective unconscious.
In trying to explain how important The Secret of the Golden Flower was to his subsequent readings and writings, Jung went back to the origin of the Red Boole and the dual question of why he had begun it and why he was unable to hnish it. He realized as he was writing it that his thoughts had settled into what he dubbed a curious mix of fantasy and prophecy, both “completely against the grain” of a medical doctor. This in itself was upsetting, so he declared himself neither prophet nor poet, saying he saw no reason to finish a book that would be “regrettably poor.” This was his ostensible reason for putting it aside, even though dreams still haunted him.
One in particular was a dream he had in 1913 that he referred to as “the Murder of Siegfried.” He kept the dream fairly private, even though he inter; preted it rigorously in 1913 and then expended much thought on reinterpreting it differently in the late 1920s. Jung’s original thought was that the attitudes of the hero were no longer appropriate for the life he needed to live, and therefore he had to kill him/them. When he returned to the dream, he thought it signified a “sort of intermediate realm . . . coming into a twilight” in which “I am this and still something else . . . something that I am, and something else that is different from me.” Throughout the next twenty or so years, the meaning of this and other dreams either eluded him or changed with subsequent interpretation as he kept trying to “get to the bottom of . . . this stream of the uncon' scious [that] began with the dreams between 1912-14.” Only when he read Wilhelm’s Golden Flower did he realize that he had not reached his “foundation” until he studied alchemy.
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In years to come, Jung’s writings expressed the development of how he inte‘ grated alchemy into analytical psychology. Aion permitted “a confrontation of analytical psychology with Christian views” and with “the central figure of Christ.” Answer to job allowed him to argue the case for God as both compasx sionate and punitive. Mysterium Conium'riom's demonstrated his ultimate inten. tion, to make his “original idea . . . represent the whole scope of alchemy, a sort of psychology of alchemy or an alchemist foundation of psychology.”
By placing analytical psychology within “reality,” he would have a system in which “the whole thing is backed up. . . . Now it can stand on its own and with that my task was done.” But having brought it to this “outermost border,” Jung was forced to recognize “the transcendent, about which nothing can be said.” And if nothing could be said, how, then, to say even that?
One of Jung’s main concerns had always been to place his work within “the great cultural tradition,” which for him meant the close of the nineteenth century, a period that coincided with the end of the reading he was required to do for his university studies. After that, he was by choice almost totally ignorant of twentieth-century arts and letters, for he seldom read contemporary fiction and never read biography or nonliction unless it covered topical subjects that interested him. His favored form of recreational reading were crimi, the crime novels and murder mysteries of writers such as Agatha Christie (his favorite) or Simenon. He devoured them in the evenings, so friends in England and France made sure to send the latest as soon as they were published.88 He never went to the theater, attended lectures only on psychological subjects, and avoided conv certs like the plague: “I have to listen intently all day long, and I don’t want to do it in my time off,” he told patients, friends, and family. He even complained when his gifted daughter Marianne practiced her piano.
VVlth his interests anchored in the late nineteenth century of his scholarly studies, he centered his idea of the ideal cultural tradition around the iconic fig’
ure of Faust. He first read Goethe’s version when he was sixteen and even then thought the ending was “incorrect” and “should be done differently.” When he started “working on the unconscious,” he began by trying to read all the differ« ent interpretations of the F aust legend. It left him frustrated because “I cannot just look at things; I have to do something with them.” Eventually, all his “inner figures” came from Goethe’s Faust, especially Philemon, whom Goethe “men« tioned only in passing.” Jung thought Philemon was a “central figure . . . a recognition that Faust skipped over and didn’t achieve.” His personal interpre tation became a way of “honoring the eternal human rights . . . the continuity of culture and spiritual history.” .
As decades passed and his theory developed, Jung became profoundly aware of his “need to integrate all the experiences of the unconscious into the historical frame in order to establish proof of it as a general human experience.” He needed to prove he was not merely writing out of his own “subjective imagination” and thought it Vital “to show the world that we have a meaningful unconscious and not just a messy concoction of perverse things.” When he made this observation, he remembered how Freud’s “depreciation” of this concept “always got on my nerves terribly.”
From 1927 onward, Jung believed that his published work should include one other value: it should be read as a continuum dealing with “questions of world views” as they confronted but were also reflected within “religious questions.”89 He believed that “analytical psychology merges in a very peculiar way with alchemy” and that alchemy was the true “historical counterpart to the psychology of the unconscious.” By 1930, he believed his contribution to the great cultural tradition would be to explain how alchemy had not only been depreci= ated but also maligned and misunderstood. Alchemy became for him a metaphor of inner spiritual growth and development and he planned to explain this through reading and commenting upon as many original texts as he could acquire, no matter what the ancient language in which they were written. His Latin was good enough that he could read it almost as easily as his native German; he was less fluent in Greek and required a dictionary; and for most other ancient languages he needed translations. He knew he would need help, but Ziirich was filled with specialists, and he could always pay them for their professional services.
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THE DECADE of the 19305 brought the famous and talented t0 Jung in ever in4 creasing numbers. Some came for his counsel, but many more came because their curiosity was piqued by the publicity he generated. Many just wanted to say they had met the controversial “highly civilized modernist” who tooled around Ziirich in his bright red Chrysler convertible, or “the primitive” whose “powerful arms” washed his own blue jeans in a tub at his medieval fortress.4 Many were intrigued by articles describing Jung as a “force” possessing an “elev phantine intelligence,”5 and prominent among them were the British writers Hugh Walpole and H. G. Wells. Both came to Ziirich to give lectures, and both specifically asked their hosts to invite Jung.
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Jung actually went to hear Walpole speak, something he rarely did for any‘ one but a psychologist. He was invited to the dinner afterward and seated in the place of honor next to Walpole. Jung told him he had not read a single one of his books but changed his story shortly after by letter, saying he had “read a very decent number” of Walpole’s novels and considered The Prelude a “psychologi~ cal masterpiece.” A friendship did not develop, however, and the correspont dence ended after a brief ritualistic exchange of mutual praise.
When H. G. Wells made a specific appointment to meet Jung in his study, the conversation was so engaging thatJun g invited the writer to stay for dinner‘ They met on several other occasions when Wells came to lecture in Ziirich, where he was exceedingly popular for his Views on how developments in tech nology and science would mandate sweeping changes in contemporary society, Later, when Jung was in London, he dined at Wells’s home. Their conversation, “with considerable elaboration,” led Wells to feature Jung by name while turning him into a Character in the novel The I/Vorld 0f I/Vz'llz'am Clissold.7
On two separate occasions, the British historian Arnold Toynbee asked Jung for appointments to discuss their respective views of mythology. Jung said it was a one-sided experience: “I told him some things about my ideas but he didn’t offer anything about himself.”8 '
F. Scott Fitzgerald watched Jung from afar during a January 1931 skiing vacation at Gstaad.9 He had been living in Lausanne for the past five months while his wife, Zelda, was in Les Rives de Prangins, the Nyon sanatorium directed by Oscar Forel. Impatient with Forel’s treatment, Fitzgerald took his daughter on vacation while he tried to decide whether to move Zelda to another facility, and if so, which psychologist to entrust with her treatment. Forel was amenable, even eager, that Zelda be taken either to Bleuler and the Burgholzli or to Jung. Fitzgerald was determined that whoever treated her had to direct a facility where she could be confined, and he was considering Ludwig Binswanger at Kreuzlingen.
Each night during his vacation, Fitzgerald sat at the same dinner table as Catharine Cabot, who by her own admission was a great snob. She stayed with him for long hours while he drank himself into depression and stupor, all the while berating her support of psychology in general and Jung in particular. To Forel’s “relief,” Fitzgerald eventually moved his wife to the Burgho'lzli, where she could be placed “under restraint.” Complaining that both Jung and Bleuler charged “$5 00” for an initial consultation, F itzgerald rejected Jung for dealing “primarily with neurosis” and accepted Bleuler because he treated “psychosis, which is to say one is a psychoanalyst and the other a specialist in insanity.”10
JUNG SEEMED surprised that so many writers were eager to engage him in conversation because he never hid his opinion of contemporary literature: “I usually can’t stand the typical literary writing. It bores me too much.”11 He may have been unread in current fiction, contemptuous of contemporary music, and
indifferent to modern art, but he still did not hesitate to express his opinions in print. In 1932, the Neue Zz'ircber Zeitzmg asked him to write an article about Pia casso to complement a Kunst/Jaus exhibition of more than 460 paintings.
Jung’s disdain was evident from his first sentence: as a psychiatrist, he owed his readers an apology “for becoming involved in the excitement over Picasso,” for the painter offered “too slight a theme” for so much public enthusiasm.12 Taking oblique aim at James Joyce, Picasso’s “literary brother” about whom he had also written, he responded to Picasso’s “strange art” from the perspective of a psychologist. Still, he claimed artistic expertise because of his ongoing study of the art produced by his analysands, declaring emphatically that “Picasso’s psychic problems, so far as they find expression in his work, are strictly analogous to those of my patients.”
Jung divided his patients into two groups: neurotics and schizophrenics, slotring Picasso into the second because he “produces pictures which immediately reveal their alienation from feeling.” Picasso was an artist “on the borderline,” whose main characteristics were “so-called ‘lines of fracture,’ . . . a series of psychic ‘faults’ ” that “disturbs one by [their] paradoxical, unfeeling, and grotesque unconcern for the beholder.”13
When the article appeared, the editors were deluged with letters from outraged readers who ridiculed Jung’s ignorance of contemporary art and resented that he dared to analyze an artist he had never met. Jung did not reply to any of the letters, but he acknowledged the barrage indirectly through a corrective footnote when he included the essay in his 1934 book, I/Vz'r/elz'c/akez't der Seele. He said he did not regard either Picasso 0r Joyce as actual psychotics but included them “among a large number of people whose habitus it is to react to a pro= found psychic disturbance not with an ordinary psychoneurosis but with a schizoid syndrome.”14 The public ridicule was humiliating and may well have been why Jung never again wrote about any modern artist in particular or contemporary art in general.”
THE PICAsso essay was Jung’s second lambasting by press and public; the first followed his 1932 essay on Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce had drifted back into Jung’s ken sometime around 1930 through the esteemed Ziirich publisher Dr. Daniel Brody of the Rhein-Verlag. As Joyce’s publisher, he planned to launch a new literary review to coincide with the reprinting of the German-language edition of his novel. Brody let Jung know that he had also supported him for the literature prize, which was his way of enticing Jung to contribute an inaugural essay to the review. That Brody was the instigator of Jung’s essay has never been questioned, but the differing versions he gave later of why he asked Jung to write it and what actually happened between Jung and Joyce have been the subject of many contradictory interpretations. jung left behind at least three versions of what became the article he published, not in Brody’s journal but in the Europaiscbe Revue. 1" The most likely reason for Jung’s multiple revisions and refinements
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Carola Giedion-Welcker had read Jung’s essay “Psychology and Poetry,” published in 1930 in Eugene Jolas’s transition;23 prior to that, she had been ill the audience of a local literary club when Jung gave the lecture from which he adapted the essay, then called “Psychologie und Dicbtung.”24 Even though Jung used Goethe as his primary example of an artist, Giedion-Welcker inferred that his critical comments about writers of “the visionary mode” were really about Joyce. She was alerted by his comment that readers were “astonished, confused, bewildered, put on our guard or even repelled” by such writers, who reminded them of “nothing in everyday life, but rather of dreams, night-time fears, and the dark, uncanny recesses of the mind.” She expressed her suspicions to Jung after his talk and believed he confirmed them when she read the note he added to the text of the published essay. In it, he described Ulysses as “a work of the greatest significance in spite of or perhaps because of its nihilistic tendencies.”S
And so, when his essay on Ulysses was published, Giedion-Welcker was on the alert for possible inferences of Joyce’s alleged pathological underpinnings. Even though Jung wrote that it would not occur to him to classify the novel “as a product of schizophrenia,” he still expressed surprise that a work he found so boring could have been reprinted ten times since its original publication. He wondered how anyone could “go through the book from page 1 to page 735 . . . without fatal attacks of drowsiness.”
Giedion-Welcker was outraged. She wrote to Jung, chastising his lack of ap« preciation for “the material from which today’s art is derived.”26 Her letter in structed him on what he should have discussed had he but known enough to do so, then dismissed him as unworthy to have written about such a great writer. After givingJung what might well be called a cram course in contemporary cul'
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ture, she ended with the scathing remark that she deeply regretted his inability to understand literature, which was so much less than his evident analytic talent.
Joyce became aware of the hrouhaha surrounding jung’s essay when Brody allegedly asked whether he should publish it in his review. Joyce dismissed it with a one-word response, “Nifdi'Ilel'l’i/llgfll. " which translates loosely as “publish it to show it up for what it is.” As Brody had enormous respect for both joyce and Jung, he gracefully evaded both writer and psychologist and let time pass while doing nothing. Thus, Jung published elsewhere, and there the matter rested until one year later, 1934.
Joyce was still smatting from the original contretemps when Edith McCormick ended his stipend, for which he blamed Jung. Having previously told Giedion-H'elcker that he would never, under any circumstance, consult Jung, Joyce now felt he had no choice but to bring his daughter to Ztirich and entrust her to “your friend, my enemy.”27 Lucia Joyce’s behavior had been increasingly erratic for several years before her father, her self-appointed “psychiatric director,”28 could accept that she needed treatment. He took her to Zi‘irich in July 1933 to be examined by Dr. Hans W. Maier, professor of psychiatry at the university and a staff physician at the Burgholzli. Maier suggested she be sent to Forel at Prangins, and Joyce agreed. Six days later he withdrew Lucia when Forel diagnosed her as schizophrenic but with “pithiatric elements,” that is, ca= pable of being cured by persuasion or suggestion. Grasping at such slight hope, Joyce and his wife took Lucia back to Paris, where they spent the better part of the next year trying to cope with what was now dangerous behavior. They returned Lucia to Forel’s care at Prangins, where she stayed for several months until she set several potentially deadly fires in her room. Forel told Joyce she had to be put under Strict supervision in a facility such as the Burgholzli and that Maier should be put in charge. Lucia stayed one week, so infecting her father with her own panic that he had her removed, more for his sake than hers, to the private Brunner sanatorium in Kijsnacht.29
At this point, Jung became the twentieth psychiatrist to supervise Lucia Joyce’s treatment. It is curious that he accepted her, as, by his own admission, he was “out of touch” and “no longer interested” in the treatment of psychotic pa= tients. For the past several years, he had limited his practice to neurosis, offering the excuse that his medical knowledge of psychosis was out-of-date.30 He probably accepted Lucia’s case from a combination of curiosity about her father and his own vanity, for there was a certain degree of satisfaction connected with knowing that the great Joyce had no recourse but to consult him. Another equally important reason was Cary Baynes’s intervention and insistence.
For the previous several years, Maria Jolas, the American wife of transition’s founding editor, Eugene Jolas, had been foremost among those who urged Jche to overcome his animosity and take Lucia directly to Jung.31 Maria had been Cary’s friend since childhood, when they shared the same privileged upbringing in Louisville, Kentucky. They remained friends as adults and were of‘ ten each other’s houseguest in Zurich or Paris. Maria was well aware of Cary’s respect for analytical psychology and shared her firm belief that only Jung could treat Lucia. But she also believed everyone surrounding Lucia would also need Cary’s help, for someone would have to take care of calming the distraught Joyce and, to a lesser extent, his level-headed wife, Nora. Maria persuaded Cary that ifJung accepted Lucia, she would have to take on the entireJoyce family as her special project, because they would all need her soothing ministrations.
Once Lucia was established in Brunner’s sanatorium, the Joyces checked into the Hotel Carlton Elite and prepared to wait out what they assumed would be, at most, one month’s treatment, after which they fully expected Jung to dismiss their daughter as well and cured. At the beginning, Jung did make scheduled Visits to Lucia, but they were decidedly unsuccessful, as he upset the girl’s frag. ile equilibrium. At their first meeting, she insulted him; at their second, she screamed, ranted, and threw things; at their third, she effected catatonia and re. fused to speak.32 Jung gave up and stopped Visiting entirely. He deputized Cary to visit Lucia several times each week, to report to him immediately afterward all that the young woman said or did. He then instructed Cary about what to do on her next visit. It was the only time in their long friendship that he insisted the reluctant Cary put both her medical education and study of psychology to practical use on his behalf.
Cary took Lucia always accompanied by a nurse who could subdue her if necessary - on various outings, such as driving through the countryside or visiting the zoo. Lucia believed she was as talented as her father, but Cary determined that her artistic abilities were better suited to crafts than art. She took Lucia shopping to find materials for sewing and other projects, even jigsaw puzzles, that the girl could do when she was alone in her room. At some of these times Lucia was a delightful conversationalist, at others she was withdrawn to the point of catatonia, at still others she was belligerent and threatening and the nurse had to soothe her.
Cary usually had afternoon tea with the Joyces on the days she observed Lucia. Sometimes, when Lucia was being difficult or uncooperative, the frustrated Cary took along her sister, Henri Zinno, in the hope that she could help pere suade Joyce to face the reality of his daughter’s condition. Nevertheless, Joyce defeated all her efforts: “It was not possible to make even the smallest dent in the wall he has erected against the understanding of [Lucia’s illness].” As Joyce always contradicted Cary’s observations, she told Jung that the details he of‘ fered in rebuttal clearly showed “how much of an anima situation it is.”33
At the end of October, Joyce went to Kusnacht in the late afternoon to m<3<3t Jung in the quiet of his study and talk about what should be done with Lucia, since there had been no change in her condition.34 Jung thought it a privilege and a “great good chance” to meet this writer whose work so perplexed himT hey talked as much aboutjoyce himself as about “his most important and sig'
nificant relation to his insane daughter.”35 The conversation confirmed Jung’s impression of father and daughter as “two people going to the bottom of the river, one falling and the other diving.”36 Jung believed their conversation “jus« dfied all [his] suspicions as to the peculiar experimentJoyce represents in liter~ ary art.”37 He insisted it proved his contention that Lucia was her father’sfemme impimn‘ice, which was the reason he so obstinately refused to admit she was mentally ill: “His own anima, i.e., unconscious psyche, was so solidly identified with her that to have her certified would have been as much as an admission that he himself had a latent psychosis.”38
Jung thought Lucia “was no genius like her father, but merely a victim of her disease.” As for her father’s “genius,” he had not changed his opinion of Ulysses: “In any other time of the past Joyce’s work would never have reached the printer, but in our blessed XX Century it is a message, though not yet understood.”
For his part, Joyce decided that if “the Reverend Dr. Jung” (as he later disparagingly referred to him) could not understand Ulysses, he was therefore incapable of understanding Lucia, a mere girl, “yung and easily freudened.”39 Probably misconstruing what Jung really told him about his daughter, and thereby reinforcing Jung’s view that he needed her as his femme inspiratrice, Joyce said with fatherly pride that “nobody could make any head of her but myself as she was a very exceptional case.”40
At the end of January 1935, Joyce dismissed Jung and took his daughter back to Paris, where the downward spiral of her disease eventually resulted in her permanent institutionalization. Before he left Ziirich, Joyce inscribed Jung’s copy of Ulysses: “To Dr. C. G. Jung, with grateful appreciation of his aid and counsel.”41 Later, in Finnegan: Wake, he asked the question he may well have first pondered in Ziirich: “Is the Co-Education of Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable?” In a sense, he answered it himself: “anama anamaba anamabapa.”"’2
Still smarting in 1945, long after Joyce had taken Lucia from Zurich, Jung compared “the far reaching influence of Joyce’s fathomless Ulysses” to “the germ” that had infected “political reality in Germany” during World War 2. His negative opinion never changed, but now he attributed novels like Ulysses to “the spirit of the age” rather than to “the perverse inventive gifts of the author.” Ultimately, however, he agreed with Ernst R. Curtius that the novel was “a work of Anti-Christ.”
JUNG FRETTED over what he wrote aboutJoyce and Picasso until the last year of his life, when he tried once again to define his views of modern art, this time for Sir Herbert Read, who was then one of the principal editors of his Collected Works.” Jung called Joyce and Picasso “two great initiators . . . masters of the fragmentation of aesthetical contents and accumulations of ingenious shards.” Jung insisted that he could interpret one of Joyce’s major symbols in Ulysses, that he knew “what that crumpled piece of paper meant, that went out down the Liffey in spite of Joyce.” He understood Joyce’s “pain, which had strangled itself by its own strength.” It was a tragedy he had seen time and again in his schizo_ phrenic patients:
In Ulysses, a world comes down in an almost endless, breathless stream of débris, a “catholic” world, i.e., a universe with moanings and outcries unheard and tears unshed, because suffering had extinguished itself and an immense field of shards began to reveal its aesthetic “values.”
In the end, however, there was “no tongue” to tell what had happened to Joyce’s “soul.”
As for Picasso, “a very different man,” it was his “ruthless strength” that instilled “dissolution” into his work. Picasso’s art was “ingenious fragmentation: it shall go this way if it doesn’t go the other way.” He seized “the unconscious urge and voiced it resoundingly, even using it for monetary reasons.” Jung insisted that he had “bestowed . . . honor” upon Picasso by comparing him to Joyce: “I could easily have done worse by emphasizing his falsity. He was just catering to the morbidity of his time, as he himself admits. I am far from diagnosing him as schizophrenic. I only emphasize the analogy to the schizophrenic process as I understand it.”
When Jung wrote this to Herbert Read in September 1960, he could not help but extrapolate to what he believed the world in general had become:
The great problem of our time is the fact that we don’t understand what is happening to the world. We are confronted with the darkness of our soul, the unconscious. It sends up its dark and unrecognizable urges. It hollows out and hacks up the shapes of our culture and its historical dominants. We have no dominants any more, they are in the future. Our values are shifting, everything loses its certainty.
