Jung

 

The count attracted an eclectic variety of people to his School of Wisdom, many of them wildly eccentric and fascinating to Jung, especially some of the titled members of the audience who flitted on the fringes of the groups of experts summoned to enlighten them. Jung prided himself on “getting along very well with these people [the aristocrats]. I knew how to deal with them up to the point where the brashness began, which they all possessed.” Through the Keyserlings, Jung and Emma met the Grossherzog (grand duke) of Hesse-Darmstadt, who invited them to be his houseguests while Jung gave lectures to his court. The grand duke was a simple man who spent his time hiding shyly behind the large embroidery frame his servants carried everywhere he went. He especially liked Emma because she sat quietly next to him, smiling her approval as he pulled his stitches through the frame. The grand duke had an “occultist” on his staff who reminded Jung of an eighteenth-century courtier: “a dark figure who just fit into the harmlessness of this royal court. Now he had culture this dark count!” 

Both the grand duke’s and Keyserling’s courts were “prickly with intellect and also a bit modish.” There Jung met the ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who often pranced around in his favorite trousers, made from a lion’s skin complete with tail, which he “occasionally wagged” for emphasis. Jung had many conversations with the egotistical Frobenius and cited his writings fairly often from that time on, but Jung was wary of the friendship.” He appreciated Frobenius’s “unbelievable vitality, such a smart man, but his ideas went overboard.” Mainly, he disapproved of the ethnologist’s “lack of culture” and “lack of proper upbringing,” blaming them for his “lack of understanding of other people’s ideas.” 

Jung held a snobbish idea of aristocracy, perhaps inherent in one born in Basel, that most snobbish city in the Swiss democracy. For the most part, he approved of aristocratic license and sided with the concept of noblesse oblige, especially among those who aped what he thought to be (without having had real firsthand observation) the behavior of the English aristocracy. 

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certain fundamental principles with which Freud’s name is associated,” YelJowlees asked Jung to explain how his views differed from Freud’s.

In his long and reasoned reply, Jung judiciously avoided all direct criticism of Freud, even as he deflated Freud’s authority. He did not allow Freud to be seen as his only rival, his polar opposite, or even his only equal; nor did he allow Freud’s theory to stand inviolate and alone as the only opposition to his. Instead, he introduced Adler’s psychology, thus placing both himself and Freud as cwo theoreticians merely numbered among others. Jung said his main contribution to psychology was his own “subjective confession,” stemming from something “personal” and allowing him to express “psychological facts” in his own way.*! He said Freud and Adler should also confess that their ideas originated within their own “subjective point of view” as well, because only when “we admit our personal prejudice” are we “really contributing towards an objective psychology.” His purpose before this British audience was to “give you some interesting ideas and let you see how I tackle things.”*? He considered himself a “craftsman,” with psychotherapy merely the craft he practiced in his own individual way, “a very humble way with nothing particular to show.” He did not “believe for a moment” that his view was “absolutely right,” because “nobody is absolutely right in psychological matters.”

For him, psychology was “not a religious creed but a point of view.”?* And the “problem” within his individual point of view was having to “wrestle with the big monster of the historical past, the great snake of the centuries, the burden of the human mind, the problem of Christianity.” He admitted his task would be much simpler if he “knew nothing”; but because of his ancestry, his education, and his wide-ranging interests, he knew “too much,” which made his responsibility toward his patients that much greater. Although he expressed the following sentiment in self-defense, it was an accurate description of his mood of the moment: “If the whole world disagrees with me, it is perfectly indifferent to me. I have a perfectly good place in Switzerland, I enjoy myself, and if nobody enjoys my books, I enjoy them. I know nothing better than being in my library, and if I make discoveries in my books, that is wonderful.” 

In his fifth and last lecture, the audience asked Jung to depart from his theory of dream analysis and explain instead how to put the transference to “practical use” within the process.*° Jung’s explanation led to a discussion of the role religion served within various psychotherapeutic systems, particularly his own. He told the audience that throughout thirty-plus years of analytic practice, he had made an informal statistical count of his patients’ religious affiliations: most were either Jewish or Protestant; practicing Catholics numbered “about six.”?” It proved to him that the Catholic Church’s “rigorous system of confession” was indeed a “therapeutic institution,” as were groups such as the Oxford Moral Rearmament Movement,:® to which a number of his patients and followers had Rravitated. 

Jung concluded that archetypal images required “a suitable form for their projection,” and that “the collective unconscious is really a serious factor in the human psyche.”?” He turned instinctively to Germany for his examples: 

In the collective unconscious of the individual, history prepares itself, and when the archetypes are activated in a number of individuals and come to the surface, we are in the midst of history, as we are at present. The archetypal image which the moment requires gets into life and everybody is seized by it. 

“I saw it coming,” Jung reminded his audience. “I said in 1918 that the ‘blonde beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany.” Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy these were not “ideas” but rather archetypes: “Give an archetype to the people and the whole crowd moves like one man, there is no resisting it.” 

None of the persons who asked questions made any reference to Jung’s view of contemporary politics, which was about to embroil him in a controversy that would taint him as a Nazi sympathizer or brand him as an active collaborator. His general political obtuseness, coupled with some of his writings, statements, and participation in suspect conferences, would create a dense cloud that hovers over his reputation long years after his life ended. All this was yet to come, but the rumbles were already there by the time of the Tavistock lectures. Still, with the innate politeness of the British, Jung’s audience focused inctead on the nuts and bolts of analytic practice.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States and a Harvard graduate, was the featured speaker, and Jung had ample time to observe him. The headline of his interview in the New York Times read “‘Roosevelt Great,’ Is Jung’s Analysis,” but his true impressions were more complicated than what he told the reporter: before he came to the United States, he thought of Roosevelt as “an opportunist, perhaps even an erratic mind”; once he heard him speak at Harvard, he thought him a “strong man, a man who is really great.” “Perhaps,” he added suggestively, “that’s why many people do not like him.” Jung was certainly among them, although he did not say so in print. He thought Roosevelt “had the dictator stuff in him,” and he disliked his wife even more, calling Eleanor “the nightmare on the way to being dreamt.” Jung thought America had been better off under Herbert Hoover, for he was “easy to see through.” 

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.. What I experienced there meant the conclusion of the Christian problem for me.” His subsequent thoughts about religion are especially revealing because he filtered his experiences through the prism of Christianity, concentratjng his thoughts around questions of good and evil. Train travel between internal destinations and sight-seeing in the cities exposed him to the sheer crush of humanity, the grinding poverty of the people, and the utter desperation of their circumstances. Jung thought all the religious images and monuments were imbued with an aura of sensuality that he found troubling, particularly the obscene sculptures that adorned the Temple of Konarak. They gave him ample opportunity to think about “the problem of evil, in how far it must be accepted since it is also a part of God’s will.” 

He posed his thesis in two different ways, that “Indian Spirituality [contains] just as much of evil as of goodness, or to say it differently: lacks as much of evil as it lacks of goodness.” What Western civilization called “the moral problem” did not play a role in Eastern societies because people felt themselves “apart” from any of the emotions Westerners equated with good and evil. Jung believed Easterners achieved the equilibrium of fatal acceptance through yoga, “the status of the Nirdvandva where they free themselves from these opposites.” For Eastern cultures, “the goal is not moral perfection but... liberation from objects.” 

Reservations surfaced at this point in his thinking: how could a person be liberated from something he neither committed nor experienced? For him, “true liberation” was possible only if he acted “honestly” in some instances and knew when or even whether to act at all in others. Everything he encountered in India managed to contradict such reasoning. He thought it was because he had never before been “under the direct influence of a foreign culture.” As if anticipating contradiction, he discounted his entire African experience: “You could say I passed through it as a tourist.” The only Arab he spoke to in Africa was his interpreter, so he learned nothing of Muslim cultures, and when he spoke to the natives in Swahili, it was in “simple, primitive” language. He had not “encounter[ed] great minds or important personalities”; nor had he discussed with the natives any significant issues pertaining to the culture and society of Eastern Africa. Even in the civilized cities of Egypt, he remained “just as much of a foreigner.” 

India was different. For the first time ever he felt himself “under the direct influence of a foreign culture,” and the only way to assess it was to compare it with his own. Everyone he spoke to in India was highly educated, many in some of the greatest universities of the West. Those he met ranged from “the guru of the Maharaja of Mysore” to the authors of sophisticated treatises on Kundalini yoga and the “cult of Kali Durga at the Kalighat in Calcutta.”!!” 

Jung found it “tremendously interesting to talk to people for whom the moral problem is not of foremost importance.” It was not “single people or single places” who created confusion in his mind about how he should regard In

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dia in general; nor could he “put [his] finger on” what puzzled him specifically. Everything, he believed, turned on the question of good and evil. Fowler McCormick equated it with “the nature of evil as evidenced by the Goddess Kali, the great destroyer, associated with the color red.”!!® McCormick recalled that “everywhere there was evidence of animal sacrifice, everything filthy, dried blood, betel nut. In Calcutta, Jung began to have dreams associated with red.” 

Jung’s conversations with learned men did not suffice to “make the integration of evil acceptable,” but they forced him for the first time to accept such concepts as “relative, so to speak. . .. Once they are made conscious, the good is no longer the good and the evil is no longer the evil, and the devil no longer has a tail.” 

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Ill and too weak to write on the voyage home, he spent much of his time in a deck chair reliving his Grail dreams and probing their meaning. He had always kept his research apart from anything connected to the Grail legend because he regarded it as l4mma’s special domain. They had discussed it from every conceivable point of view, and he knew “all the details” of the various legends surrounding it, so “the big question” for one already familiar with “the symbols of Christianity” was, what is the special significance of the Grail? Was it, he asked, simply “a variation of Communion ... an infinitely precious gift one receives for having been a good knight?” If so, how then to reconcile those who belonged to “the [Arthurian] circle of the Grail [who] committed murder and slaughter.” What remained and was therefore paramount in Jung’s self-analysis was “the visibility of the Grail or the Grail’s castle.” Ultimately, “it is the secret of individuation, and that is a mystery and human comprehension simply ends there.” 

Jung described individuation as “a mystery one will never understand.” To find it was “a lonely search” perhaps akin to the “process of dying,” for one had to give oneself “over to the impersonal” in order to seek it. “Only few could bear such a search,” he thought, attributing these curious, unfocused thoughts and images to “the distance from Europe, the completely different surroundings” in which he found himself in India. He thought he may have had such dreams there because his overall question was how and why the evil he encountered in India was “not a moral dimension,” but rather “supported by an honest profession as a divine power.”!” 

Another comparison/contrast with Christianity happened on the hill of Sanchi: “Buddhism dawned on me for the first time, but I could not yet put it into words.” He was “deeply moved to the point of complete bewilderment,” and for the first time understood what the life of Buddha stood for, “namely the realization of the self... that the self stands above all gods and really represents the mystery of the world and the human existence.” For Jung, the Buddha was completely different from Christ, who was also a representation of the self: “The Buddha overcomes the world but out of insight. Christ does not overcome out of insight but as an event, for he is the victim.” Jung had already read extensively 

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Writing generally but with both essays in mind, Jung told Baynes that 1940 was the “fateful year” for which he had been waiting throughout the last twenty-five. Although he had believed since 1918 that “a terrible fire would spread over Europe beginning in the North East,” he did not foresee that it would lead to “such a disaster” and had “no vision beyond 1940 concerning the fate of Europe.” Unaware that his terminology would result in two catchphrases that would define the end of the twentieth century, Jung told Baynes a new era was dawning, “the meridian of the first star in /the age of] Aquarius . . . the premonitory earthquake of the New Age” (author’s emphasis).