Carl Jung – Mary Mellon Letters
I’m very much upset that one of your letters has been lost-I have too few of them in the first place without the British Empire taking liberties.
I know of no way to retrieve it either.
I wonder if any of mine have gone astray.
You never answer specifically so it is hard to tell-except about the dreams-when they are too much to overlook.
The one about your betraying me was a terrible shock-and I know I needed it in just that fashion.
Cathy, who is a barometer for me, said just about that time-on looking at the snake medallion on my wrist-“I’m tired of that one-why don’t you wear the other” (meaning the clover Paul had given me) that set me thinking and coupled with the dream I had an inkling that something of the sort, which you told me in your letter, was wrong.
Then you explained it.
But it is so hard, Dr. Jung, to be so connected and not run into such pitfalls.
I can’t help the former and it takes eternal vigilance to be aware of the danger of losing myself in you.
But the opposite is true too. I look back now on the two years since I have seen you of your feeling for me. Paradoxically, that is what left me free to be myself and really love you.
I know, as well as you, that we may never see one another again, but after your last letter I feel better about it.
I begin to see just why not seeing you again could never alter anything, though at the same time there is nothing I want more-and perhaps we shall.
The whole thing is so strange that it may contain that too.
All these realizations about myself in connection with you are the sole cause, I am sure, of my being able to conceive another child-which has just happened.
No one else would believe or understand-nor does anyone else have to-but it is true.
It is a strange thing-the feeling of being with child again and stranger still to know and, though it doesn’t sound like very much-a good deal has happened through you, but not of you-so to speak-if you understand what I mean.
I know that everything is the result of the miraculous year I spent with you-but one thing leads me to believe that I have kept or gained my own identity.
That is the difference there is between my expression and that of those around me who have also been touched by you.
In other words there are people who live and breathe Jung, as you know.
It is a pattern they take up-based on your ways, your likes and dislikes, your mode of living, speech and to my great amazement-even handwriting. I have had letters from one or two in the N. Y. Psychological Club-and I swear I had to look twice to see if it weren’t yours.
I am sure I would have fallen into the same pattern had it not been for the realization or feel (sic] what connection it has with what has happened to me these past three years.
I express it badly but somehow, somewhere, some way you are in this child too.
It is as if I had been twice impregnated, for had it not been for the brutal and spiritual anguish which you and I have forced me to go through, I do not believe I would ever have conceived again.
I would never have got to the place where I knew what Paul is-who I am in relation to him, what I must be in relation to the world-and what I am in relation to you.
It all came to me in a wave the night of October 7-and I wrote Paul a letter.
This child was conceived soon after.
It is all so strange and mysterious-so very difficult and marvelous-that I am baffled and can only thank God that I understand even a slight part of it.
37 years ago, you once told me, you began to analyse-37 years ago I was born. I don’t understand. ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Friendships with Mary Mellon and J.B. Priestley, Pages 18-20
The war proved to be a great trial to me. People in the army were much better off. They could do something.
I only could seek a refuge for my daughter-in-law, who was in the 8th month, and for my grandchildren in the western part of the Alps.
That was in the blackest days of May 1940, when France broke down.
On account of my critique of the German tyranny I was on the black list of the Gestapo, and if the Germans had invaded Switzerland, I would certainly have been put on the spot. Well informed Germans told me so.
My pupils in Germany were forced to repudiate my views publicly.
I tell you these things, because you probably have heard the absurd rumor that I am a Nazi.
This rumor has been started by the Freudian Jews in America.
Their hatred of myself went as far as India, where I found falsified photo’s [sic] of mine in the Psychological Seminar of Calcutta University.
It was a photo retouched in such a way as to make me appear as an ugly Jew with a pince-nez! These photos came from Vienna!
This rumor has been spread over the whole world.
Even with us it has been picked up with such alacrity, that I am forced to publish all the things I have written about Germany.
It is however difficult to mention the anti-Christianism of the Jews after the horrible things that have happened in Germany.
But Jews are not so damned innocent after all-the role played by the intellectual Jews in prewar Germany would be an interesting object of investigation.
I have challenged the Nazis already in 1934 at a great reception in Frankfort in the house of Baron van Schnitzler, the Director of the I. G. Farben concern.
I told them, that. their anticlockwise Swastika is whirling down into the abyss of unconsciousness and evil.
And this prediction has come off “and how”!
After all this you can imagine our inexpressible joy, when we heard, that the Americans had gone ashore in Morocco! ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Friendships with Mary Mellon and J.B. Priestley, Pages 38-39
You will never know what joy your long letter gave me.
It was so long and complete and told me exactly what I wanted to know. I had to cable you when I received it.
As I told you in the cable, it arrived at exactly the moment I needed it most.
By some miracle they have always done just that. In the meantime I received your cable in answer to mine about the Paracelsus book.
You remember that I wanted to give you the “Splendor Solis” before I left Zurich, and that it had been sold. This then is my 70th birthday present to you.
From all I could find out about it, it is a very rare book, containing 10 parts to the British Museum’s.
But I didn’t want to go ahead with it until I was sure you wanted it. You may have it in your hands by this time.
It comes to you with my great love.
If it is as rare as they say, no rarer person could receive it.
It appears that I may be able to publish your “Psychology and Alchemy” after all.
I have gone to all lengths in England (personal emissaries, cables, letters-all but myself) to find out the exact status of the book in relation to American rights.
Routledge says no one has the option and I am negotiating for it now.
You see-within the Bollingen Series I want to found a Library of Alchemy. I have already published Plato’s “Timaeus”~and yours as the next would be perfect.
There is no such thing in the whole world, I am sure, as a Library of Alchemy. Mary Mellon, Jung’s Friendships with Mary Mellon and J.B. Priestley, Pages 41-42
But I must see you-myself-you and I had the idea together and I cannot rest until I am with you again.
I must talk to you, Dr. Jung, about so many things-I am tied up in this idea, my personal life is, I mean, I have conflicts which only you will understand, and you must help me too in the long range plan about yourself.
I can only tell you this. In face of the criticism which you relayed to me and which I have heard here, and in consideration of the people you have behind you in this country and England, I am absolutely certain that I can be of great service to you with the outlet I have started.
It needs authority behind it which I have acquired (God knows why except for my great love for you which all must feel is more than a passing fancy) and it needs the funds which I have at my disposal.
It needs wisdom which I am gaining as time goes on, and it needs a certain moving in a sure direction without looking to right or left, sure in the direction and the goal to which it points-and no hysteria about you and your work.
With your help I want to gather you up, so to speak, for the future.
That is the backbone of the Bollingen Series-and what I am working toward.
At the same time I mean to publish works that are pertinent and of fine quality to go alongside of you. It is much like Eranos, in print.
Your fertilization of all those lectures has made Eranos.
Yet you needed and will always need the other ones around you to feed you and bring in the ideas which need fertilization.
To no one except those working with me have I expressed this.
But I must talk to you. I need you myself on top of all this, as you must know.
Whatever brought us together I don’t know-but I do know it was meant to be, and that I am meant to do something about us.
You [Carl Jung must look like the bust Toni Wolff has of you, when you were much younger, if you are thin.
Take care and stay as well as you can during this hard winter to come.
The famine in Europe is too frightful to think about. I am sending you 11 pounds a week, made up of butter (or fats) and sugar.
Let me know what else you want in the packages. Coffee? Tea?
If what we send carries properly then I will send more to you and others.
Let me hear from you again as soon as you can. ~Mary Mellon, Jung’s Friendships with Mary Mellon and J.B. Priestley, Pages 42-43
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