Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
To R. J. Zwi Werblowsky
Dear Dr. Werblowsky, 21 May 1953
Best thanks for kindly sending me your two lectures.
I have read them with great interest; the second even twice, as Father White came to Zurich the day before yesterday.
Your critique is most interesting but not exactly easy reading.
When I saw Father White he hadn’t yet read it.
But I hope I shall have an opportunity to discuss certain points with him.
You are absolutely right about the hornet’s nest.
The two dark figures in Kafka are a duplication of the shadow or of the self (the two white balls).
This duality attaches, for instance, to the messengers from the underworld
(Apocalypse of Peter) or the “helpful animals.”
As a rule the shadow appears only in the singular.
If it occasionally appears as a duality this is, so to speak, a “seeing double”: a conscious and an unconscious half, one figure above the horizon, the other below.
So far as I know anything definite about it, the duplication seems to occur when the split-off figure is real in a special sense-real as a ghost.
Duplications also occur in dreams, but less frequently than in fairy tales and legends.
The duplication is the origin of the motif of the hostile brothers.
I read the Ibn Ezra passage in a book I can’t remember the name of for the moment. I hope to locate the quotation sometime.
With best regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 116-117.