Carl Jung: I shall read them as soon as I have a few quiet moments.
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
To H. G. Baynes
Dear Peter, 6 March 1937
Thank you very much for kindly sending me your two offprints.
I shall read them as soon as I have a few quiet moments.
But you know everybody and everything keeps me busy here.
I shall probably have to wait for my vacation to do some human and normal work.
Concerning the question of traumatic schizophrenia, you are free to use this term inasmuch as you have sufficient evidence to Substantiate such a term.
It is quite possible and indeed even probable that a specific disposition consisting in a congenitally fragile tissue can be fatally upset by an emotion.
It is even a widespread experience that psychosis can be acutely produced by overwhelming emotions.
The insect drawings you mention don’t necessarily prove that there is a psychosis.
They only show that there is a tendency towards a basic schizophrenic dissociation, the insects representing autonomous (Mendelian?) units that have a certain tendency to autonomy.
In the same way as the cave-dweller filled the remote corners of his caves with drawings of hunting animals, so your patient tries to catch his autonomous units by drawing them.
He tries to keep them in association with his conscious mind, thus decreasing the danger that they all run away in different directions and disappear altogether.
The fact that he can draw them shows that his conscious mind is synthetic enough to control these little beasts which, if the control should fail, would reappear as those well-known schizophrenic personality- fragments or insulae.
The insects that appear on the tree show that he succeeded in establishing the proper hierarchy in his unconscious.
At least the picture points out that positive possibility.
You know the schizophrenic disposition is rooted much deeper than the neurotic one.
It really starts in the sympathetic system.
I have seen the results of certain researches which are carried on by a chemist in the psychopathic hospital in Boston about schizophrenia.
These results show that the physiological coordination of vegetative processes is just as much and in the same way disturbed as the mental coordination.
The vegetative factors also go by themselves.
Cordially yours,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 252-253
