[Carl Jung: For decades I have been either not understood or misunderstood…]
To Eugen Bohler
Dear Professor Bohler, May 1956
Best thanks for your friendly letter and my apologies for tearing the MS away from you.
All the copies have still to be corrected.
I have already availed myself of your valuable suggestions, as you will see in the printed text.
Your remarks obviously touch on something very essential in my style, though I wasn’t aware of it at all.
For decades I have been either not understood or misunderstood, despite all the care I took to begin with in the matter of “communication and logical persuasion.”
But because of the novelty of my subject as well as of my thoughts I ran up everywhere against an impenetrable wall.
This is probably why my style changed in the course of the years, since I only said what was relevant to the business in hand and wasted no more time and energy thinking about all the things that ill-will, prejudice, stupidity and whatnot can come up with.
Bachofen, for example, took infinite pains to be persuasive.
All in vain.
His time had not yet come.
I have resigned myself to being posthumous.
It is still much too early to speak to an educated public about “symbols of self-recollection.”
It would all be utterly incomprehensible since the foundations for any real understanding don’t yet exist.
First and foremost it must be understood what the bell is tolling.
Your dream tells us.
It begins high up in metaphysics.
Already it stalks the earth.
Your dream is an epilogue to my MS.
With best greetings,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 298-299.