Jung: His Life And Work, A Biographical Memoir Paperback
The Frontiers Open 1919–1925
It was a good thing for Jung that the frontiers of Switzerland were relatively closed during the war.
He had the largest capacity for work I have ever seen in anyone, but even he could hardly have managed to cope with a large practice during the time of the “confrontation with the unconscious.”
The only other work he ever did that could even compare with the latter was finding his way through the unknown jungle of alchemistic texts, and at that time had to cut down his practice to two or three days a week.
His other writing was all done during holidays. He always took longer holidays than most analysts and I can testify that these were an advantage to his analysands, rather than the reverse.
It is good for everyone to test from time to time how far he can be independent, and long holidays prevent either analyst or analysand from going stale.
But the longest holidays are too short when it comes to exploring the hitherto completely unknown.
Although just before the war came to an end Jung had completed the “confrontation with the unconscious,” he still felt that something more was needed.
He had kept a record in writing of all he had experienced and had painted a great many pictures of the contents of the unconscious which he had seen, but he still had the feeling that things recorded only on paper did not yet have a real enough form.
He felt:
“I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Or, to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the ‘Tower,’ the house which I built for myself at Bollingen.”
This feeling, though strong and persistent, was still rather vague when the war came to an end, and it took a few more years before he could realize it in concrete reality.
Besides, the frontiers were hardly open before numbers of foreigners descended on Jung.
They came from many countries, but it was at this time that the Anglo-Saxons began to predominate, as they were fated to do throughout the years between the two world wars, so that Jung gave most of his seminars in Zürich also in English.
Of course, the frontiers were never again crossed with the complete freedom which had prevailed before the war.
We now not only had to accustom ourselves to passports, but for some time after the frontiers reopened there were considerable formalities at all consulates, to obtain a visa for this or that country.
These activities settled down remarkably quickly, however, or else people became so accustomed to them they were no longer bothered by them.
One of the first English doctors to come to Jung in Zürich was Godwin Baynes (always called Peter), who soon realized the value of Jungian psychology and, in spite of a rather checkered career, devoted his whole life to it, until his death during World War II.
He was a tall man, even a few inches taller than Jung, a university “rowing blue,” and outstanding in sport and games.
He came to Jung originally because his first marriage had run on the rocks while he was in service abroad.
One of the first tasks he undertook was the translation of Psychological Types into English, so that it was able to appear in 1923, soon after the first German publication, in 1920.
Since Peter Baynes did not, at that time, know German very well, his translation of this volume has the advantage of being the only translation of any of Jung’s books into any language that Jung himself went through word for word.
Peter Baynes was an extravert and an exceedingly friendly person; he very soon made himself at home in Zürich. Emma Jung and Toni Wolff were particularly fond of him, and before long he began his first term as Jung’s assistant.
In many ways he was the best assistant Jung ever had, for he was singularly free of a certain jealousy and a sense of inferiority that working with an outstanding man like Jung unfortunately seems to breed in other men, even those considerably younger.
Baynes was a medical doctor but free of the usual medical prejudices and limitations.
He never for a moment wanted to go “beyond Jung,” a phrase one hears too often nowadays, though almost always from young men who are still far from beginning to understand where Jung stood or who he was.
This period as assistant was the first of several during all of which Peter Baynes was able to be of great aid to Jung in his overburdened practice.
Peter Baynes once told me that beyond doubt his true vocation was to be Jung’s assistant, but his extraverted, open nature constantly involved him in other plans.
As a result, he was always tom between England and Switzerland, and even spent some time in America.
His spells as Jung’s assistant were therefore never of very long duration, so in the autumn of 1922, he went back to England.
He had meanwhile met and fallen in Jove with Hilda Davidson (niece of the then Archbishop of Canterbury) and had married her some time before returning to England.
Two years earlier, in the summer of 1920, Jung had held his first seminar in England.
As far as Esther Harding remembered the seminar was arranged by Constance Long probably assisted by Peter Baynes.
It was held at Sennen Cove in Cornwall and its subject was a book called Peter Blobb’s Dreams, but as far as I know no written record of the seminar exists.
The attendance was small, only about twelve people, which must have been extremely pleasant for Jung.
He always loved small groups and much regretted the fact that his seminars inevitably increased in size as time went on.
Apparently everyone stayed in one boarding house at Sennen Cove and Jung gave analytical hours as well as his seminar.
Such seminars and free social contact with Jung continued, with variations, until long after the Second World War, and were almost as helpful to the development of his patients as was analysis itself.
This first seminar in Cornwall brought another doctor to Zürich who was destined to devote her life to Jungian psychology and to play a leading role in its development in the United States.
Eleanor Bertined was one of the first women doctors at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
Later, while in general practice, she discovered Jung through his books.
In 1920 she went to London to work with Constance Long, and thus came to attend the seminar at Sennen Cove.
Directly afterward she went to Zürich for about a year to study with Jung and, when he was on holiday, at his suggestion, she and Peter Baynes analyzed each other’s dreams.
It was while she was in Zürich for the second time, in 1922, that she met the English doctor Esther Harding, and these two, together with Dr. Bertine’s old friend Kristine Mann, later founded the first Jungian group in New York.
This was uphill work, for publicly the Freudians were much the first in the analytic field.
Eleanor Bertine told me once that she always warned all the young people who came for analysis and wanted to become professional psychologists that they must hope for no outer support in their careers, for she was not in a position to give it.
This had an enormous advantage, for none of the early patients of these doctors stayed with them for reasons of career or ambition,
and they were therefore able to found a group that relied entirely on the inner way and on self-knowledge.
Even today, when Jungian psychology has become so much better known and therefore, unfortunately, far more attractive to purely ambitious people, one feels the beneficial effects of this early training in New York.
In the summer of 1968, the late Franz Riklin Jr., Marie-Louise von Franz, and I were invited from Zürich to give lectures at the celebrations for Esther Harding’s eightieth birthday on Bailey Island in Maine.
I have never taken part in a congress where the atmosphere was more relaxed and related and where there was such freedom from personal ambition and intrigues.
I realized then—even more than before—how much the American group owed to the genuinely Jungian approach of Eleanor Bertine and Esther Harding.
And I should like to record that shortly before his death, Jung mentioned with the greatest appreciation how well both of them had done.
Even before the first (1920) English seminar in Cornwall, Jung was able to go where he “had longed to be: in a non-European country where no European language was spoken and no Christian conceptions prevailed, where a different race lived and a different historical tradition
and philosophy had set its stamp upon the face of the crowd.”
He continued: “I had often wished to be able for once to see the European from outside, his image reflected back at him by an altogether foreign milieu.”
He described this journey to North Africa in Memories, so I will draw attention to only a few points from this unforgettable experience of which I often heard Jung speak.
Actually he spoke much more often of his longer and still more interesting stay in East Africa in 1925 but, having spent six months myself in Tunisia, I was especially interested in his impressions of that country, for it had also made an unforgettable impression on me and left me with a great many unanswered questions.
The African trip was the first of the journeys Jung took for the chief purpose of gaining a point de repère outside his own civilization and in order to understand totally different cultures.
It was the only trip on which the language barrier was almost complete.
Only in the hotels and big towns could some few Arabs speak French, and Jung knew no Arabic at all.
He once told me it was the only language he entirely failed to learn and he attributed this curious circumstance to the fact that his father knew the language well.
At all events, it gave him a different approach from that of his later journeys on which he could talk to people and ask questions.
The Arab cafés off the beaten track are particularly fascinating in Tunisia—you seem to be literally in another world—and Jung spent many hours in such cafés, listening to conversations of which he did not understand a word, but acutely observant of gestures and the emotions they
were evidently expressing.
He soon learned that what Europeans regard as “Oriental calm and apathy” is really only a mask.
What interested him most was the subtle change in their features when North Africans were speaking to a European, and thus he “learned to see to some extent with different eyes and to know the white man outside his own environment.”
Jung went to North Africa in the spring of 1920 with Hermann Sigg, a Swiss friend, who had to go on a business trip.
They landed in Algiers, then traveled by train along the coast for thirty hours to Tunis.
He gave a vivid account of this journey and of his first impressions of Africa in a letter to his wife (part of which is published in Appendix III3 to Memories).
He told her that he was still completely bewildered and that though he knew Africa was speaking to him, he had as yet no idea of what it was saying.
After Tunis the two men went South to Sousse, where Jung left Sigg to transact his business while he went on alone into the desert, to Tozeur, from where he rode with his dragoman on swift mules to the oasis of Nefta.
The desert and its oases are a world apart from the African cities, but it was the people who interested Jung most.
He said that he
“felt cast back many centuries to an infinitely more naïve world of adolescents who were preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness, in which they had existed from time immemorial, and to become aware of their own existence, in self-defence against the forces threatening them from the North.”
One vast cultural difference between the Moslem and Christian world dawned on Jung only some twenty years later when he visited the Taj Mahal in India.
The incredible height of the Himalayas and the Taj Mahal were two of the most vivid impressions he brought back from India.
The beautiful Taj Mahal—built in A.D. 1632 by the Emperor Shah Jahan as the mausoleum of his favorite wife and in which he also was later buried—struck Jung as the most perfect temple of love ever erected.
As he sat, letting it speak to him, he realized that the Moslem religion is founded on the Eros principle, that is, the feminine principle of relationship, whereas Christianity, indeed, all the other great religions, are founded on the Logos principle, that is, the masculine principle of discrimination.
In his last long book, the Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung presented his most pictorial description of these two principles.
He wrote:
Logos and Eros are intellectually formulated intuitive equivalents of the archetypal images of Sol and Luna. In my view the two luminaries are so descriptive and so superlatively graphic in their implications that I would prefer them to the more pedestrian terms Logos and Eros, although the latter do pin down certain psychological peculiarities more aptly than the rather indefinite “Sol and Luna.”
Shortly before this passage, Jung had made clear that in the bright light of the sun everything can be seen and discriminated, and that the sun therefore represents a much lighter consciousness, whereas the mild light of the moon merges things together rather than separates them:
It does not show up objects in all their pitiless discreteness and separateness, like the harsh, glaring light of day, but blends in a deceptive shimmer the near and the far, magically transforming little things into big things, high into low, softening all colour into a bluish haze, and blending the nocturnal landscape into an unsuspected unity.
Jung described Logos and Eros as gods in the Swanage seminar of 1925.
He pointed out that if we had lived in the time of Sophocles we would have realized “the great god Eros, god of relatedness” and also “Logos, the god of form.”
He explained that the principle of Logos does not produce logical or intellectual thinking, for Logos is an experience, a revelation.
Saint Paul and the Gnostics still thought according to the laws of Logos (one thinks of the former’s revelation on the way to persecute the Christians at Damascus, for example).
So we may assume from Jung’s experience in the Taj Mahal (as the most perfect temple of love which has ever been built) that an experience of the god Eros led to the foundation of the Moslem religion, whereas the god Logos was the determining force in the case of all the other great religions.
We can even prove this in the case of the Christian religion, for the beginning of Saint John’s gospel equates Christ himself with the Logos.
The foregoing provides some idea of the difference between these two principles and indicates how his realization of this difference in the Taj Mahal answered questions that had remained unanswered with Jung through all the previous years.
He did indeed have a dream on the last night in Tunis which “summed up the whole experience” in Africa and which helped him to digest his overabundant impressions and ideas.
He gave this dream and its interpretation in considerable detail in Memories, but since It not only was the climax of his journey but contained almost unbelievably much of the future in which these two principles and the dark and light opposites found their place, I will remind the reader of its main line.
In his dream, Jung was in an Arab city, walled and with four gates, therefore a mandala.
In the center was a citadel, a casbah, in itself typically North African, but surrounded by a moat, like a European medieval castle.
The gate beyond the wooden bridge was open, and, eager to see more, Jung began to cross the bridge, but the young Arab prince to whom the citadel belonged met him halfway and tried to knock him down.
They wrestled wildly, crashed into the railing, and fell together into the moat.
The prince then tried to force Jung’s head under the water in order to drown him, but the latter succeeded in getting the prince’s head under instead, not to kill him, for he felt great admiration for him, but to save his own life and to subdue the prince.
Jung evidently succeeded in this for they were then sitting together in a large octagonal room in the center of the citadel and he was forcing the unwilling prince “with paternal kindness and patience” to read a magnificent book in the “Uigurian script of West Turkestan.”
This nevertheless was Jung’s book and had been written by him.
To read this book was absolutely essential and, just as the dream ended, the prince yielded.
Royal and aristocratic figures in dreams always refer to the Self; therefore, as Jung pointed out, although on account of his dusky complexion the prince was clearly a shadow, he could be no personal shadow, but rather represented a so-far-unknown shadow of the Self.
If we look back, we remember that the No. 2 personality, that representative of the Self in Jung’s childhood, always turned out to be positive, and we can say the same of the “confrontation with the unconscious,” where this figure appeared first as Elijah, turning later into the helpful Philemon.
But as a symbol of the totality, this figure must be negative as well as positive, and now its other side appeared and even tried to extinguish life.
In Memories Jung reminded the reader of Jacob’s struggle with the angel of the Lord, Jehovah’s own dark side which does not know men and so tries to kill them.
At the time, Jung realized that this dream was a result of the terrific impact of North Africa; five years later, on his next visit to Africa, he further comprehended that he had been in danger of being submerged, for the dream was the first hint of “going black under the skin,” a danger which, as he pointed out, is too little acknowledged by Europeans in Africa.
Jung also pointed out that when he went to Africa to find a psychic observation post outside Europe, he had been unconsciously motivated by a wish: “to find that part of my personality which had become invisible under the pressure of being European.”
Until then, since this part of him was in opposition to his conscious personality, he had tried to suppress it, but now it had burst forth to
become fully visible for the first time, for these apparently “alien and wholly different Arab surroundings” had awakened an archetypal memory.
This was one of the dreams which Jung at the time could content himself only with “noting the phenomenon and hoping that the future, or
further investigation, will reveal the significance of this clash with the shadow of the Self.”
The revelation of all that it meant was indeed far in the future, for it was only when he was studying alchemy, nearly twenty years later, that its full significance must have dawned on him.
Marie-Louise von Franz drew my attention to an extraordinarily close parallel which Jung quoted much later in his paper “Arbor Philosophica,”8 from the Arabic Book of Ostanes.
In this text there is a description of the alchemistic lapis (the Self) which represents it as a tree which grows on the tops of the mountains, as a young man born in Egypt, and as a prince from Andalusia, who torments the adepts who are searching for the lapis, and even kills their leaders.
On the next page, Jung quoted another text which says literally: “Unless thy stone be thine enemy, thou will not attain to thy desire.”
We see clearly from these two alchemistic parallels that had Jung not met this dark side of the Self, his “confrontation with the unconscious” would not have been adequate or complete.
This dream, then, the outcome of his first visit to Africa, can be called the first epilogue to that confrontation.
When I pointed out that his work on the unconscious never had to be repeated, I meant that by far the major part of his confrontation had
been successfully carried through and brought to a close, but there were still constant additions to it, epilogues that really continued all his life, for no human being can ever exhaust the infinite extent of the collective unconscious.
It is interesting that although the anima appeared first in her negative aspect (as is usual with most figures that represent some aspect of the unconscious) until now the Self had always appeared in a beneficent form to Jung.
This is a Just-So Story which cannot be explained, but it almost seems as if the unconscious itself wanted to be made conscious.
Therefore, as Jung was the pioneer in this field, apparently his No. 2 personality encouraged his investigations and reserved the revelation of its dark and destructive side until Jung was fully and finally convinced of the reality and efficacy of the unconscious.
He had already experienced the dark side of God in his childhood, both in his early phallus dream and when he was forced to think the
blasphemous thought to the end at the age of eleven, so the idea was not by any means entirely new to him.
Jung ended his account of this first visit to Africa with the words:
I did not at the time have any glimmering of the nature of this archetypal experience, and knew still less about the historical parallels. Yet though I did not then grasp the full meaning of the dream, it lingered in my memory, along with the liveliest wish to go to Africa again at the next opportunity. That wish was not to be fulfilled for another five years.
When Jung returned to Zürich in the spring of 1920, he was obliged, by all the patients and pupils who flocked to him and by the invitations for lectures and seminars abroad that poured in on him, to live a much more extraverted life than he had been used to during the war.
Jung always gave himself wholeheartedly to whatever he was doing, but by temperament and nature he had a great longing for introversion.
He met this need by his rather long holidays. But Jung was always ready, even during his holidays, to see anyone who was in genuine need.
Later he frequently came down to Küsnacht from time to time during the holidays for at least one whole day’s work.
During the years we are considering in this chapter (1919–25), it was the need for a really introverted refuge which struck Jung more and more.
There was an island off Schmerikon, at the end of the upper Lake of Zürich, on which he had spent a number of camping holidays and he
was much taken with the idea of buying this island and building on it a stone representation of his “innermost thoughts and knowledge.”
At the time, the island indeed had enormous advantages.
It was a really introverted refuge where no one could get to him except by boat or by an exceptionally long swim.
Yet it was only about twenty miles from Küsnacht, so that he could always be reached for real emergencies.
He was disappointed when his efforts to buy this island failed.
Many years afterward, he used to point to it and say that it reminded him of how fortunate it was that one so often is prevented from getting one’s heart’s desire.
It would obviously have been impracticable for an old man, whereas his Tower at Bollingen remained his greatest pleasure to the end of his life.
It was not easy, however, to find the right site.
He remained true to the upper Lake of Zürich, which even now has remained real country with few houses on its shores.
It proved so difficult to find the right piece of land that he even thought of buying some land above Bollingen which had a magnificent view of the lake and mountains, quite near the spot where Marie-Louise von Franz, at his advice, built her tower over thirty years later.
But he never really meant to build anywhere but on the shore of the lake for, as he said in Memories, “It was settled from the start that I would build near the water.”
At last, in 1922, this ideal site became available.
He was able to buy a large piece of land— large by Swiss standards, for there is a great scarcity of land in Switzerland—with a long
frontage on the lake.
It was secluded and yet accessible, for it was only just over a mile from Bollingen station, from which there were infrequent but direct trains to Küsnacht.
Indeed, the railroad line which formed the boundary of Jung’s property on the land side turned out to be a curious protection to his privacy.
It was not near enough to the Tower to be a noisy disturbance, but it formedi a dangerous crossing, particularly later, in the days of the automobile.
There was a primitive approach, two heavy poles forming the two gates, and it was necessarily near a bend in the line so that one was aware of the approach of a train only at the last minute.
It always struck us as singularly suitable that Jung’s Tower should be guarded by a dangerous approach.
Jung did not take to a car until seven years after he bought this land.
One of its great advantages was that, whenever he had time, he could reach one of his houses from the other by sailboat.
This was his favorite way of transportation and he always felt it to be particularly suitable, because he was thus between the water (chief symbol for the unconscious) and the air (with a view of the outer, conscious world).
He still much favored a bicycle as a means of getting about, though in the early days he usually used the railroad and walked from Bollingen station.
Jung was always patient with the train journey, although it was slow and dawdley in those days, since he had extraordinary powers of concentration.
Jung described the building of the Tower and the additions that were made to it in Memories.
He began the first building in 1923 and did a great deal of the actual construction of the original Tower with his own hands.
One wonders how he had time, for it was a particularly busy year. Peter Baynes had gone back to England in the autumn of 1922, leaving him without a male assistant.
Toni Wolff was proving herself to be an able woman assistant, but one analyst can never quite replace another, particularly since some patients need a woman analyst and others must work with a man.
Moreover, Toni was not a doctor, and—as she told me—Jung at first was anything but delighted at the idea of her becoming an analyst and discouraged it for some time.
By the beginning of 1929 however, when I came to Zürich, Jung had accepted her completely as an assistant, and sent a lot of people to her, though he was always careful—as indeed he was with all his assistants—to send her only those people who were suited to her.
In fact, if he felt at all doubtful, he would ask them to come back and tell him if it did not go well.
Within these limits, however, she did excellent work and was of great assistance to him in his overburdened practice, as well as to the analysands themselves.
I once asked him why he had at first been so much against Toni’s becoming an analyst.
He replied that since he believed her to have an unusual literary ability, he had been keen for her to devote herself to creative work.
He was afraid if she became an analyst she would do little writing. That turned out to be the case: she did write some excellent papers and lectures but they were few.
I was reminded of what Jung had said when she was writing the longest of these papers for the Festschrift for his sixtieth birthday, on July 26, 1935.
Her other papers usually started as lectures for the Psychological Club, sometimes slightly enlarged and revised later.
But when she wrote her long Festschrift paper, for the only time in her life she drastically reduced or even cancelled her analytical hours as far as she could.
On the other hand, she wrote with enthusiasm and seemed to feel great satisfaction in the work during the one or two years she devoted to it.
I asked her near the end of her life whether she ever regretted not having written more.
She replied she would rather have spent her lifetime helping other people than as an author; I cannot say that she altogether convinced me. It was a pity she could not combine the two forms of work.
She would indeed have been most unusually qualified to write a full-length book, and I cannot help regretting that she never did.
In July, 1923, Jung again went to England to give another seminar, this time at Polzeath in Cornwall.
The occasion was organized by Peter Baynes and Esther Harding, and twenty-nine people attended, including Emma Jung and Toni Wolff.
Mrs. Jung told me later that, though she had enjoyed it very much, she had been puzzled then and for some years afterward by the English.
They struck her as much more extraverted and scattered in their affections than the
Swiss.
She had yet to experience America and to learn what a really extraverted life is like.
She did not visit the United States until 1936, and then she came back positively breathless.
Although the Polzeath seminar had been given nearly six years before I came to Zürich, all of Jung’s pupils who had attended it were still constantly talking about it, most especially Esther Harding, on whom it had made a deep impression.
Since several of the things he spoke of then, which he had noticed in the dreams of individuals, have become worldwide threats today, I often
find myself thinking of what Esther Harding and others told me about that 1923 seminar.
Jung already saw then that, with the decline of the influence of the Church, man’s impersonal ideas, which he later called “archetypal images,” were floating in the air, so to speak, for our present Weltanschauungj is completely deficient in receptacles for it.
This energy thus falls into the unconscious from whence it returns in archaic and very unacceptable forms.
A good example —then ten years in the future, after the Polzeath seminar—is the way the old wanderer, Wotan, came to life in Germany when the Nazis came into power.
Such archaic contents had already given Jung much trouble, for they would suddenly erupt and disturb a smooth and harmonious
relationship in the so-called transference.
Although Jung agreed with Freud as to the importance of the transference, he took a very different view of its content.
Freud took all the projections of the patient to be personal, whereas Jung thought that only the upper layer had a personal origin.
Therefore he did not think that remaining bound by the transference, after all the personal projections had been worked out, was
necessarily infantile, but was more usually caused by impersonal contents which no longer find their place in our religion.
How this works out in practical analysis is shown most clearly in a case which Jung gave in his essay “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” in which the factor that caused such a prolonged transference turned out to be the image of the patient’s lost god.
Of course, in such cases it is fatal to break off the analysis prematurely.
Jung gave four chief causes for the repressions which had already sent the impersonal elements into the unconscious.
These points made a deep impression upon me, because I had suffered from all of them in my early connection with the Church.
The first of these tendencies was the way the Church increasingly excluded nature.
But it must be emphasized that Jung always pointed out the difference between Christ’s original teachings and what the Church has made of them.
Christ himself evidently had an excellent relation to nature.
I will quote only one logion as evidence of this: “Wheresoever there are (two, they are not without) God: and where there is one alone I say I am with him. Lift up the stone and there thou shalt find me: cleave the wood and I am there.”
Outer developments since 1923 reinforce Jung’s conclusion.
Art has almost entirely abandoned nature, in favor of all kinds of abstractions.
Builders no longer seem to take any notice of the landscape in which their buildings are set.
The most beautiful old medieval cities are surrounded by great boxlike apartment houses, each more hideous than the last.
The waters of our rivers and lakes are increasingly polluted for the sake of great industries.
The younger generation of farmers seems to have lost all feeling for nature and flocks to the cities.
If we go on as we have been doing for the last fifty years, there will soon be no nature left in the overpopulated countries.
On the other hand, nature is coming back into the consciousness of quite a number of people.
Natural science arose in the nineteenth century, and for the first time the real miracles of nature were investigated as a science.
There is also a general tendency to make expeditions into nature, to seek it again, as it were, and national trusts have arisen to protect particularly beautiful country sides from building, and so on.
But unfortunately, in spite of anti-litter campaigns, there is a growing and deplorable tendency on the part of the public to ruin such places with orange peels, empty bottles, cigarette butts and the like, for nature has been neglected too long and this neglect is too deeply written in the blood of “Christian” man.
The second point Jung made was that the Church increasingly excluded animals.
But again, here it was the Church and not Christ himself, for from the apocryphal (Oxyrhynchus) sayings we learn that the disciples asked him:
“Who are they that draw us to the kingdom that is in heaven? Jesus answered: The fowls of the heaven, whatsoever is under the earth, the fishes of the sea, and these are they that draw you and the kingdom is within you.”
Appreciation of the animal kingdom could hardly go further; evidently Christ himself thought that grace could be found most directly through the birds and fishes.
This attitude of the Church has, more than anything else, alienated man from his own as well as from the larger impersonal instincts and has since produced a deplorable state of affairs all over the world.
As naturalists like Gerald Durrell, Bernard Grzimek, and Konrad Lorenz always emphasize, many species of animals are in danger of being entirely exterminated.
Everywhere, man is their greatest danger, killing them recklessly for his own profit and regarding them as of no account except for profit.
As far as the Christian world is concerned—and it is the people brought up in Christian countries who are the worst sinners in this respect—this could never have happened had the Church not excluded nature and animals.
But again there is also a countermovement, and animals are also appreciated today as never before.
Laws are made for their protection, most countries have a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and never were more animals kept as valued pets.
But this is only of recent years, and unfortunately it seems to have made little difference to the exploitation or even to the extermination of animals where “Christian” man thinks there is a profit to be made.
The third exclusion is perhaps the worst from the psychological point of view, because it has prevented man from recognizing his own shadow.
It consists in the exclusion of the inferior man.
The latter was condemned as sinful and had to be completely repressed.
He was very largely equated with sexuality, which was permitted only for the purpose of propagation.
The fact that the church bells were even rung in South America to remind man of his duty to produce more souls for the Church’s flock has always remained in my mind.
Jung always used to say that sexuality had two aspects: reproduction, which is carnal sexuality, but it can also be used to worship, so to speak, the god Eros, that is, relationship.
It was the latter aspect that the Church condemned as sinful.
The outer results of this repression have become so obvious that it is hardly necessary to enumerate them: overpopulation—which Jung regarded as a greater danger to mankind in the long run than even the atom bomb—is an ominous threat all over the world.
Youth indulges far too much (as an enantiodromia from the too little of the Church) in carnal sexuality and hardly knows any longer that real relationship between the sexes exists or that it has anything to do with sexuality.
The so-called inferior, or rather—as he is now called—the underdeveloped, man is a burning problem everywhere, though perhaps principally in Africa.
The black and white problem is one of the worst that the United States has had to face, and very soon England will have exactly the same problem.
These phenomena would never have developed so negatively had the Church not excluded the inferior man, so that the problem of our own shadow, which alone would qualify us to deal with what we call the inferior or underdeveloped man outside, has never been dealt with.
But again one must not forget the opposite movement; slavery was abolished only in the nineteenth century and only quite recently have we begun to study the customs of primitive man with the idea that we might learn something from them; before that ethnology was the study of a curio.
Moreover, outwardly at any rate, we have begun to do something about the so-called inferior man among us. (Deplorably though, only the very few do anything about him in themselves.)
We have now begun a sort of science of human weakness and have changed our attitude to it radically.
The fourth repression was of creative fantasy.
If fantasy is given full freedom it will probably lead the individual to find a divine spark in himself, his own No. 2 personality, to use that much later formulation.
Such individual production of symbols would have undermined the authority of the Church, which is what it wanted to avoid at all costs.
But this led to our lamentable lack of an impersonal attitude and to the suppression of many creative people through the centuries.
The Church indeed has apparently little influence nowadays, yet—as suggested before—these long repressions are written, as it were, in man’s blood and continue to function in quite other areas.
Industry, for instance, has taken over the repression of creative fantasy, in the soul killing repetitive work it demands from the great majority of its employees.
Many of these workers have small creative forces within themselves, and while they worked independently, or in small businesses, they had ample scope to employ them while using some initiative and choice in their work.
In the old building or carpentry trades, for instance, there was scope for creative fantasy, but in the modern factory there is none, only a deadly repetition of just the same work day after day.
It is this monotony and mechanical treadmill that is largely to blame for the industrial troubles all over the world.
Naturally, the workers long for more change and fantasy in their lives and hope vainly to be able to buy it with higher wages.
A few attempts have been made by certain farsighted employers to introduce more change into the work and this has met with most encouraging success.
But centuries of the repression of creative fantasy by the Church are very difficult to repair.
Perhaps it is in this fourth category that the most damage of all has been done.
I hope that enough of the content of this seminar has been recalled to show how early Jung became aware of these dangers that are threatening our very existence today.
Shortly before his death he wrote much more about them, for he was always very mindful of what a danger man had become to himself.
We must now return to the Tower which, for Jung himself, was by far the most important acquisition of this year.
The form in which he had to represent his innermost thoughts in stone was not planned ahead, but grew gradually, as he recalled in Memories, “following the concrete needs of the moment.”
It was only later, after several additions to the original 1923 Tower, stretching from 1927 to 1956, that he could see “how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.”
But the first Tower was in its roundness already a perfect, simple mandala, which was for Jung an expression of the Self, the ultimate that he could attain.
Over the door of the original round Tower he chiseled the following words into the stone: “Sanctuary of Philemon, penitence of Faust.”
Later, when, in making additions to the house, this inscription had to be walled in, he repeated it above the inner door to his “retiring room,” which he built in 1934.
The Tower was built primarily as a place where Jung could be “reborn in stone,” and where he could be entirely himself, “a place of spiritual contemplation.”
There were also “concrete needs of the moment” from the very beginning.
He could never forget the part that Toni Wolff had played in his “confrontation with the unconscious,” when her sympathy and courage had contributed so much to the successful outcome of those difficult years, thus enabling him to make his “confession in stone” of the deepest insights which he had then gained.
And the Tower also profited Toni, for she loved being there. Not that she appreciated it at first.
Jung was very amusing about her initial reactions, for such a primitive way of life—doing everything for themselves, “all the simple acts that make man simple,” as Jung purposely intended—was completely outside Toni Wolff’s previous experience.
They cut their own wood, drew their own water, at first filtering lake water, for it was only in 1931 that Jung got a water diviner and
discovered his own excellent spring, which still, however, needed to be pumped by hand; and of course they did all their own cooking, cleaning, and dusting.
“Toni’s hair literally stood on end whenever we got a new pot,” he said, and still laughed when he told me about it, around 1934.
But Toni soon learned to love the simple life and to reckon the time she might be in Bollingen as by far the happiest part of the year.
I never heard Jung complain of noise, not even after a bathing beach had been opened next to his garden at Küsnacht, but one can well understand his growing need for a secluded place entirely his own.
Although at times he shared it with his family or his friends (for instance, Hermann Sigg, at whose instigation he had undertaken his first journey to North Africa, often sailed up with him for a day or two at the Tower), Bollingen was primarily a place where he could be quite alone and where even his nearest and dearest could not “drop in” on him while he was working, and he loved it more than anything else from the beginning to the end.
Only about two years before his death, I was sitting with him one day as he was chopping wood beside the lake.
We were speaking of the Buddhist belief in reincarnation.
I remarked that I hoped that, if that were how things were, this would be the last time I had to reincarnate! Jung began to agree with me warmly, as he always had before in such discussions, but he suddenly stopped and looked all around him in silence. Then he said: “No, I am wrong. If I might have Bollingen, I would be willing to come again.”
Jung emphasized in Memories that Bollingen was primarily the home of his No. 2 personality, that timeless or eternal figure in man which yet needs the No. 1 personality to experience three-dimensional reality and the here and now in this moment of time.
He said:
At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. Here I am, as it were, the “age-old son of the mother.” That is how alchemy puts it, very wisely, for the “old man,” the “ancient,” whom I had already experienced as a child, is personality No. 2, who has always been and always will be. He exists outside time and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen.
I do not know whether it has anything to do with the fact that Jung’s land and much of the surrounding country is the so-called area of St. Meinrad and is old church land, but Bollingen certainly has a special quality.
You feel far more in yourself there than elsewhere and after any illness it has a singularly healing quality.
I first realized this fully from something Jung once said.
Even before Marie-Louise von Franz bought her land there, we were a good deal at Bollingen.
At first I used to stay with my old friends, Hans and Linda Fierz, and after their deaths, Linda most kindly bequeathed to M.-L. von Franz and myself a Gastrechtl in their house, which was close to Jung’s.
While I was staying in Bollingen, if I used the privilege sparingly and tactfully, I was allowed to look in at the Tower from time to time.
But once, when I was down at Küsnacht for my whole vacation, I asked Jung if I might occasionally drop in from Küsnacht, providing I was prepared to go at once should the moment not be propitious, as was always the arrangement when I was in Bollingen.
I at once met with an unqualified refusal.
He explained later that when I was staying for some time in Bollingen, I did not upset him, but if I came up from Küsnacht, I would bring quite a different atmosphere and that would inevitably be a disturbance.
I had from the first visit felt a most special quality in the Tower, in its view over the lake, above all in Jung himself, but it was only when I was meditating on Jung’s refusal that I got my first dim idea of what this quality was.
Jung was, as it were, completely in his No. 2 personality at Bollingen, and that, or something in the place itself, stopped one worrying about the thousand and one trifles with which the No. 1 personality is always concerned.
To a certain extent, I suppose, one also got into one’s own No. 2 personality there and was therefore no disturbance to Jung.
But this was not so when one came up from Küsnacht; one was automatically an upsetting influence then, so one just had to learn to keep away.
This, of course, does not mean that Jung never invited people from the world of No. 1 to visit him in Bollingen.
He did often, but then he knew they were coming and was prepared for them.
It was the unexpected “dropper in” from an alien atmosphere who had to be discouraged, or Jung found his time being wasted with having to find his way back into the world of No. 2.
One also felt the presence of his No. 2 personality in Küsnacht or wherever one met Jung in the outside world. But he wore the No. 1 personality, the persona of Prof. Dr. C. G. Jung, over it.
At Bollingen that was not the case, except when he was prepared to meet people from the outside world.
His very clothes were those of No. 2, in the sense that they had nothing to do with the prevailing fashion but were old comfortable clothes, eminently suitable for the simple life he led at Bollingen, chopping wood, cooking, and so on.
As the No. 2 personality was so entirely constellated at Bollingen, it is natural that the most important part of his creative work was also done there.
When he first got there from the outside world, he always spent some days acclimatizing himself to the place, doing all those jobs that have to be done in the simple life there or even just staring at the lake.
Then, when he was thoroughly in tune with the world of No. 2, his best ideas came to him, and he wrote as No. 2 wished, although of course No. 1 did the actual writing, translating ideas too strange into language that could be understood.
He also wrote a great deal at Küsnacht, especially later, when he had more time, but the most creative part was always done at Bollingen.
From the beginning, Jung was alone a great deal at Bollingen.
He wrote in Memories of some curious visions or psychic events that came to him in his solitude and he also gave many of the reasons that made his Tower a suitable residence for No. 2. It was built—mostly at four-year intervals—from 1923 to 1956, the beginning dating from two months after his mother’s death, the last part being built some months after his wife’s death in 1955.
Therefore, as he pointed out, the Tower was a place that “was connected with the dead.”
Jung’s mother died unexpectedly in January, 1923, while he was staying in the Tessin.
He described in Memories the terrifying dream he had the night before and his surprising journey back to Zürich when two opposite emotions so strangely made place for each other.
These two emotions about death are indeed an archetypal motif; I mention only the example of Saint Augustine’s interpretation of Christ’s death as a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) with the mother, therefore as a cause for mourning and rejoicing.
He said: Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his nuptials into the field of the world. He came to the marriage-bed of the cross, and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and he joined himself to the woman (matrona) for ever.
Jung had indeed had a dream where his father questioned him about marital psychology about two months before, which he thought afterward might have warned him, but at the time it never occurred to him that it could refer to his mother’s death.
Jung’s mother had moved, with her daughter, to Küsnacht some years before, in order to be near her son and her grandchildren, whom she adored.
Emma Jung once told me that the children often stopped in to see their grandmother on their way home from school, and that this had
solved a problem which might otherwise have been difficult.
Neither Emma Jung nor her husband attended church, yet they were quite sure that children should be brought up with a religious background.
Emma Jung told me that, while the children were still very young, old Mrs. Jung was an ideal solution, for she still believed, or at any rate thought she believed, the Christian creed implicitly and was delighted to teach it to her grandchildren.
Jung knew from his own childhood that his mother “was somehow rooted in invisible ground” which had to do with nature, so that he was not afraid of the children being taught a too conventional, rootless religion.
Altogether, from all I have heard, especially from her great-nephew, Franz Riklin Jr., it must have been a great loss when she died; she was seventy-five years old.
The year 1923 was a very eventful one for Jung, crowded with impressions.
As far as I know, 1924 was a comparatively quiet year, but 1925 again must have been one of the most eventful and crowded years of his life.
He was in America at the beginning of the year, and in January undertook his productive journey to the Pueblo Indians with three American men. ~Barbara Hannah, Carl Jung: His Life and His Work, Pages 102-114
