Therefore I wouldn’t care to belong to any other nation
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
To Arnold Kunzli
Dear Herr Kunzli, 12 January 1944
Having been away from home for some time I am only now getting down to answering your kind letter with your review.
Above all I want to thank you heartily for the excellent review, which I’m sorry to hear must be printed in abbreviated form.
This is yet another reminder of the fact that I have to be presented to my contemporaries only as a third-class passenger.
It all hangs together with Switzerland being a hundred years behind the times.
Compared with Pulver’s review, yours has the great merit of singling out the essential, which remains invisible with Pulver, and not only with him but with all the others as well, so that it then looks as if one had actually said nothing.
I don’ t hold it against the Swiss for being officially one of the most unspiritual nations in Europe, on the contrary I sympathize, since their spirituality consists in their fear of the spirit.
They still have, thank God, sufficient instinct to avoid its dangers and to enjoy poets who have been dead for a hundred years or, if more recent, are insignificant.
In our age of worldwide deracination it is a veritable blessing that there are still people who are immune to the spirit, or at least take serious pains to skirt round everything the spirit might mean with all conceivable circumspection.
This shows true respect for the spirit, even though it is sometimes a hard job to play the role of the tabooed with good grace.
Therefore I wouldn’t care to belong to any other nation, for even a positive evaluation of the spirit, however enjoyable it may momentarily be for an author, always degenerates into capriciousness: you then have the spirit, or think you have, and are thus relieved of the obligation to fear it.
Then the spirit comes in the form of the devil, as the cruel fate of Germany shows.
Perhaps you could place the whole review with a Swiss daily? Bund? Basler Nachrichten?
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1., Pages 340-341.
Every individual and every nation has its own modes of experiencing this psychic reality.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
In terms of Jung’s concept, every archetype is in its essence unknown psychic factor and therefore there is no possibility of translating its content into intellectual terms.
The best we can do is to circumscribe it on the basis of our own psychological experience and from comparative studies, bringing up into light, as it were, the whole net of associations in which the archetypal images are enmeshed.
The fairy tale itself is its own best explanation; that is, its meaning is contained in the totality of its motifs connected by the thread of the story.
The unconscious is, metaphorically speaking, in the same position as one who has had an original vision or experience and wishes to share
it.
Since it is an event that has never been conceptually formulated he is at a loss for means of expression.
When a person is in that position he makes several attempts to convey the thing and tries to evoke, by intuitive appeal and analogy to familiar material, some response in his listeners; and never tires of expounding his vision until he feels they have some sense of the content.
In the same way we can put forward the hypothesis that every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning which is expressed m a series of symbolical pictures and events and is discoverable in these.
After working for many years in this field, I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavour to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician’s variations are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted.
This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic totality of an individual and also, paradoxically, the regulating center of the collective unconscious.
Every individual and every nation has its own modes of experiencing this psychic reality. ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Page 1-2
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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