Carl Jung: He is Gargantuan in every respect and helpful like all fat people.
To Heinrich Zimmer
Dear Professor Zimmer, 14 December 1936
First of all I want to thank you most heartily for your very friendly review of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Secondly, I enclose letters of recommendation to various Americans.
I give you these letters sealed, because they also contain personal matters.
- Prof. W. E. Clark of Harvard University, whom I know personally.
I had some delightful talks with him on the occasion of my visit there.
He is a very introverted man who must be approached with the politeness due to animals in the bush, that is to say one must act as if one had not seen him and must talk softly and slowly so as not to scare him off.
It is also advisable to whistle before going into the forest so that the rhinos won’t be startled out of their slumbers but are gently and melodiously prepared for your coming and have time to make themselves scarce.
He has a very nice wife who is the exact opposite.
- I also recommend you to Prof. W. E. Hocking of Harvard University.
This one is “correct.”
He wears a stiff collar day and night.
But once you have deeply acknowledged his correctness and conventionality and given him a chance to explain that he is not what he looks like, the way is paved for a useful conversation.
His rebellion against American Christianity, or rather against the Genius Agri Harvardensis, has brought about a strong link with Taoist philosophy.
A few sublimities dropped sotto voce from Chuang-tsu and Chu-his should strike the right note.
His wife overflows with feeling and it is very advantageous to display a certain helplessness.
- The third recommendation is to Prof. Harry Caplan at Cornell University.
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The fourth is to Prof. Blake, director of the Widener Library at Harvard.
He is Gargantuan in every respect and helpful like all fat people.
He is a linguist (Slavic languages).
- Don’t omit to visit my friend Leonard Bacon, the American poet, whose most important work
appears to be his “Animula Vagula.”
8 He lives in his private theatre where it is all tremendously noisy and diverting.
- In New York I can recommend you to our Psychological Club, whose president is Dr. E. Henley ….
I should be greatly obliged if you could tell me whereabouts in Indian literature Surya or the sun is described as one-footed.
I think I have read it somewhere but cannot find the note.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 222-223
Carl Jung: People always have some scapegoat.
Visions : Notes of the seminar given in 1930-1934 (2 Volume Set) (Bollingen)
So for our patient to recognize her own condition is tremendous progress. Hitherto she had thought it was her husband or the devil or circumstances. People always have some scapegoat.
Perhaps it is the parents who dies twenty years before but are still working against one if only twenty years ago such and such a thing had not been said!
That is exteriorizing oneself, seeing the brain storm outside.
Therefore she goes inside, realizing that the storm is in the inner sea, and there makes the discovery that somebody else is sick.
She had always been sick before in a storm herself and lost her morale completely.
In this case seasickness means demoralization through the wrong psychology, the projection of one’s psychology into other people, for one then has no point of view naturally; one doesn’t exist, one is scattered.
In this dream for the first time she is not seasick, because she recognizes, as her action shows, that the storm is in herself.
So the eive conseuences do not touch her but a little boy in the arms of a nurse.
A little lamb was in her arms before, a female lamb, but now it is a little boy, and since the patient really has a little boy, he would symbolize what she has achieved or brought forth so far.
It is something new, and that attempt at a new form of life is seasick, which means that she is shocked, de- moralized.
She attempts to go to her own town, and on the way she receives a severe shock which makes the boy, her honest attempt, seasick.
For a while he is disintegrated; but she is not disintegrated, seasick.
She knows that she is simply checked for the moment, and that is the beginning of objectivity, of a higher quality of consciousness.
Therefore Schopenhauer says that the only divine quality in man is humor, because humor is a consciousness behind consciousness, an ego behind the ego, and observer on a different level who sees what you see and thinks what you think.
And she makes the hopeful statement that this is the first time that she has not been seasick in such weather-the first time she has not been demoralized in a brain storm-which means, as I said, tremendous progress. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 50-51
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