Toni Wolff: …one would often not live in the body in analysis
Miss Wolff: Would it be going too far to say that one would often not live in the body in analysis, that one has to be back in one’s own reality in order to experience it absolutely?
Analysis is never in itself a real situation; it is an anticipation as an initiation is an anticipation.
One has to be in one’s own place, as she is when she is back in America.
Dr. Jung:
That is always more or less the case, but even in analysis one can be more in the body than she was.
Certain people are quite outside; at the slightest provocation they jump out of their skins, and it is impossible to prevent them; sometimes they go on in a very dangerous way, they are flooded by the unconscious, they get drowned in it.
One such patient was sent to me by a colleague who besought me to take the case, but it was too late.
That was a man who had been tapped by analysis and out flowed the whole river of the unconscious, there was no stopping it.
I tried to build dams but the water was always rising over everything and the fellow went crazy.
One cannot make the doctor responsible for it, it is just a misfortune, as for instance, in so many thousand chloroform cases, one case reacts with instantaneous death and it cannot be prevented; that may happen to the most skillful operator.
I hope I have made myself clear about this admittedly difficult piece of psychology, the paradoxical role of the Self.
The Self is here leading the patient back to the tangible reality.
You know in the psychology of the unconscious the body is always something like earth, it is heavy, dense, a thing which cannot be removed, a real obstacle.
It is the here and now, for to be really in the here and now, one must be in the body.
But we have a peculiar faculty of stepping out of the body, which is again like the primitive. Instead of saying: “I dreamt of my neighbor’s Kraal,” he would say:
“In the night when I was sleeping I left my couch and went across to my neighbor’s Kraal.”
He describes it as if it were his own activity, while we know it is not. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1315-1316
Toni Wolff – Anthology – Quotations
The loss of Fraulein Wolff has hit me very hard indeed. She has left behind in our circle a gap that can never be filled. My health rests on a shaky foundation. But when one is in one’s 79th year one no longer be surprised at anything at all. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 121.
It might be said of her that she [Toni Wolff] was “Virgin” as defined for us by Esther Harding, meaning simply an unmarried woman who, since she belonged to no man, belonged to herself and to God in a special way. Toni Wolff to Sallie Nichols; C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 47-51
Then after a pause, Miss Wolff added this: “You know, sometimes if a man’s wife is big enough to leap over the hurdle of self-pity, she may find that her supposed rival has even helped her marriage! This ‘other woman’ can sometimes help a man live out certain aspects of himself that his wife either can’t fulfill, or else doesn’t especially want to. As a result, some of the wife’s energies are now freed for her own creative interests and development, often with the result that the marriage not only survives but emerges even stronger than before!” ~Toni Wolff, C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff – A Collection of Remembrances, Pages 47-51
She [Toni Wolff] had very changeable looks, as so many intuitives do, and could sometimes look beautiful and sometimes quire plain. Her extraordinary brilliant eyes-mystic’s eyes-were always expressive. ~Helena Henderson on Toni Wolff, Carl, Emma, Toni Remembrances, P. 31.
This time the feminine element will have conspicuous representatives from Zurich: Sister Meltzer, Hinkle Eastwick (an American charmer), Frl. Dr. Spielrein (!), then a new discovery of mine, Frl. Antonia Wolff, a remarkable intellect with an excellent feeling for religion and philosophy, and last but not least my wife. ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, pp. 438-41.
He [Jung] was only about forty at the time, but, as we know, his schoolfellows at the gymnasium had already called him “Father Abraham,” and I think anyone who knew them both well, and often saw them together, would agree that, while he seemed the prototype of the wise old man, she [Toni] had a quality of eternal youth. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
It was anything but easy at first for him to find a modus vivendi by which she [Toni] could give him her extraordinary gift—it would not be an exaggeration to call it her genius—for companionship in the “confrontation with the unconscious.” ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
As we saw in the preceding chapter, Toni Wolff was brought by her mother to Jung because of her depression, accentuated after the sudden death of her father. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
I do not know exactly how long the analysis lasted but I think about three years. It was followed by a period during which they [Carl & Toni] did not see each other at all. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
Jung had already realized her amazing gift, and now he found that his feeling for Toni added to rather than diminished his affection and devotion for his wife and family. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
The reality of his family and home were an absolute necessity to him [Jung], especially during this time of facing the unconscious, and we must remember that his problem of how to include Toni Wolff in his life fell within the same period It was most essential for me. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
To have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My family and my profession remained the base to which I could always return, assuring me that I was an actually existing, ordinary person. The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits . . . [but family and profession] were actualities which made demands on me and proved to me again and again that I really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling about in the winds of the spirit, like Nietzsche.
Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts—which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality. For me, such irreality was the quintessence of horror, for I aimed, after all, at this world and this life.
No matter how deeply absorbed and how blown about I was, I always knew that everything I was experiencing was ultimately directed at this real life of mine. I meant to meet its obligations and fulfill its meanings. My watchword was Hic Rhodos, hic salta! Thus my family and my profession always remained a joyful reality, and a guarantee that I also had a normal existence. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
It seems hard that, just at the time he [Jung] was tried to the uttermost by his “confrontation with the unconscious,” Jung had also to deal with perhaps the most difficult problem a married man ever has to face: the fact that he can love his wife and another woman simultaneously. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
Jung also did not yet know that the anima frequently projects herself into a real woman and that this projection endows that woman with the whole numinous quality of the unconscious—yes, she even has the fascination of a goddess. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
We have already seen a first appearance of the anima, when Jung was still a boy, in the girl he met near Sachseln on his way back from visiting the hermitage of Niklaus von der Flüe. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 86
Toni Wolff was perhaps—of all the “anima types” I have ever known—the most fitted to carry the projection of this figure. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
She [Toni] was not beautiful in the strictly classical sense, but she could look far more than beautiful, more like a goddess than a mortal woman. She had an extraordinary genius for accompanying men—and some women too, in a different way—whose destiny it was to enter the unconscious. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
Indeed, she [Toni] learned of this gift through her relation to Jung, but she afterward showed the same gift when she became an analyst; in fact, it was her most valuable quality as an analyst. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
Many years afterward—during Jung’s long illness in 1944—she [Toni] asked me if I could teach her how to do active imagination, because she had never really done it at all! (I was amazed, for I knew she had helped many people with the method and as a rule it is quite impossible to do this unless one has already gone through the experience oneself.) ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
But I soon found out that not only had she [Toni] no ability to do active imagination, she had not the slightest wish (except for a dim feeling that she really ought to) to experience the unconscious at first hand. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
She [Toni] had no doubt whatever of its [Active Imagination] objective existence, but no inclination to go into it herself. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
She [Toni] could unhesitatingly accept whatever genuine experiences other people had there and give them the firmest support by her calm attitude toward the most irrational, even incredibly strange, phenomenon. I have never seen anyone else in the least like her in this respect, but then, people with a touch of genius are usually unique. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
During the time of separation [From Jung], Toni fell back into her original depression, not so badly, but unmistakably. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
Jung still hesitated to see more of her [Toni] outside analysis, however, for he knew how drawn he was to her and he was most reluctant to inflict any suffering on his wife and family. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
He [Jung] once told Marie-Louise von Franz and me that, curiously enough, it was his family that had given him the final impetus to seek a modus vivendi, whatever it might cost. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
He [Jung] told us that this fear had kept him awake a whole night, a night during which he slowly realized that if he refused to live the outside attraction [with Toni] that had come to him entirely from the unconscious against his will, he would inevitably ruin his daughters’ Eros. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
What saved the situation was that there was no “lack of love” in any of the three. Jung was able to give both his wife and Toni a most satisfactory amount, and both women really loved him. Therefore, although for a long while they were at times most painfully jealous of each other, love always won out in the end and prevented any destructive action on either side. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
Emma Jung even said years later: “You see, he never took anything from me to give to Toni, but the more he gave her, the more he seemed able to give me.” ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
The desire somehow to destroy the marriage and marry the man herself. Toni told me once it had cost her more than anything in her life to learn that she must not give way to this almost universal feminine instinct. It was a characteristic of Toni to learn facts slowly—she was an intuitive type—but once she had learned them, she knew them forever and never wavered again. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 87
She [Toni] also realized later that Jung’s unswerving loyalty to his marriage gave her more than she could possibly have had without it. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 88
It was of the greatest possible help to Jung to have the companionship of Toni, with her unfailing sympathy and understanding, during the greater part of his “confrontation with the unconscious.” ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 88
He [Jung] said: “Either she did not love me and was indifferent concerning my fate, or she loved me—as she certainly did—and then it was nothing short of heroism. Such things stand forever, and I shall be grateful to her in all eternity.” ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 88
Later, Jung often experienced such phenomena (loud reports in the furniture, for example) as a pre-stage to a creative effort (usually they occurred before he realized what he was going to write). It was at bottom the same incentive as that which had led him finally to face all the difficulties of his friendship with Toni Wolff: not to accept the promptings of the unconscious had a negative effect on his surroundings. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 89
I have to admit that, without believing some of the specific accusations, my image of you was somewhat darkened, especially after Fraulein Wolff told me that, if you had been a German, you would have voted for the Nazis. ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 48
Please give my warmest greetings to your dear wife and to Fraulein Wolff and do pass on my new address to them. James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 95
This time I owe a special debt for my work with Fraulein [Toni] Wolff. ~James Kirsch, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 130
At last I’m able to thank you personally for the kind letter you wrote me on the occasion of Toni Wolff’s death. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 172
On the day of her [Toni Wolff] death, even before I had received the news, I had a bad relapse of my tachycardia. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 172
- W. [Toni Wolff] died so suddenly and so entirely unexpectedly that one could scarcely realize her disappearance. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 172
I had seen her [Toni Wolff] two days earlier – both totally unsuspecting. As early as mid-February I had Hades dreams, which I related entirely to myself, because nothing pointed to Toni. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 172
None of the people who were close to her [Toni Wolff] had any warning dreams, while people in England and Germany did, and in Zurich only some who knew her merely superficially. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Kirsch Letters, Page 173
“I feel the need to recommend the collected papers of Toni Wolff to your attention.
They are distinguished not only by their intellectual content but by the fact that the author had personally experienced the development of analytical psychology from the fateful year of 1912 right up to the recent past and was thus in a position to record her reactions and sympathetic interest from the first. Her papers also have a documentary value. Even those who did not know the author personally will glean from them an impression of the versatility and depth of her spiritual personality. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 424-425
Note: Daniel Brody was theproprietor of Rhein Verlag, Zurich, publisher of the Eranos Jahrbilcher.
In the first volume of [Eranos] proceedings, therefore, Jung’s contribution turned out to be comparatively short, as it was drawn from the sketchy notes taken by Toni Wolff. ~Gerhard Wehr, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 265.
The hetaira or companion is instinctively related to the personal psychology of the man. The man’s individual interests, tendencies, and, if need be, problems lie within the purview of her consciousness, and through her they are stimulated and advanced. She gives him a sense of personal value apart from collective values, for her own development requires that an individual relationship be drawn out and realized in all its nuance and depth.
The function of the hetaira would be to awaken in the man the individual psychic life which goes beyond his masculine responsibility, to make him a whole personality. This development generally becomes a task only for the second half of life, after his social existence has been established. ~Toni Wolff, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 187-188
He [Jung] was “the prototype of the wise old man,” whereas Toni Wolff enjoyed “the quality of eternal youth. ~Barbara Hannah, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 187-188
At much the same time of the fantasy he made the extraordinary discovery that of all his friends and acquaintances only one young girl [Toni Wolff] was able to follow his extraordinary experiences and to accompany him intrepidly on his Nekyia to the underworld. It was anything but easy at first for him to find a modus vivendi by which she could give him her extraordinary gift-it would not be an exaggeration to call it her genius-for companionship in the ‘confrontation with the unconscious. ~Barbara Hannah, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 188
The Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah said flatly that Emma and Toni [Wolff], the mother figure and the hetaira figure, were the two fundamentally inseparable sides of a single problem. ~Gerhard Wehr, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 189
Toni Wolff was perhaps-of all the ‘anima types’ I have ever known-the most suited to carry the projection of this figure. She was not beautiful in the strictly classical sense, but she could look far more than beautiful, more like a goddess than a mortal woman.
She had an extraordinary genius for accompanying men-and sometimes women too, in a different way-whose destiny it was to enter the unconscious. Indeed, she learned of this gift through her relation to Jung, but she afterward showed the same gift when she became an analyst; in fact it was her most valuable quality as an analyst. Curiously enough, she did not ever enter the unconscious on her own account. ~Barbara Hannah, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 189
What saved the situation was that there was no ‘lack of love’ in any of the three. Jung was able to give both his wife[Emma] and Toni [Wolff] a most satisfactory amount, and both women really loved him. Therefore, although for a long while they were at times most painfully jealous of each other, love always won out in the end and prevented any destructive action on either side. ~Barbara Hannah, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Page 189-190
You see, he [Carl Jung] never took anything from me to give to Toni [Wolff], but the more he gave her the more he seemed able to give me. ~Emma Jung, Jung: His Life and Work by Barbara Hannah, Page 119.
Toni Wolff was Jung’s close collaborator. She was certainly part of that process of search and discovery, when everything seemed still fluid and formulations were tentatively being sought. Wherever the Jung’s were, Toni Wolff was there also. She participated with her whole being during her whole life in Jung’s world. Tina Keller, The Memoir of Tina Keller-Jenny, Page 28.
The Self is at the same time a unique thing, a totality and also a group. As such it can be said to have two aspects, the inner and the outer. As the inner, it is the many-told factors, archetypes, figures, situations, symbols, etc. which constitute it; and as the outer, it is a group of people which are an inherent part of the life of an individual. Both aspects are interrelated. ~Toni Wolff, A Memoir of Toni Wolff, Page 46.
The Eastern mind is far ahead of us in the knowledge of the basic psychological facts. I will only remind you of the fundamental law of the opposites, which ancient Chinese philosophy has formulated under the symbols of the Yang and the Yin. Yang and Yin are cosmic principles as well as psychical ones. ~Toni Wolff, Some Principles of Dream Interpretation, Page 5.
The archetypes are “categories of imagination,” typical forms of apperception and behaviour, inherent psychical patterns earlier than any consciousness. They are the self-representation of human. The archetypes are the real underlying factors of autonomous complexes. ~Toni Wolff, “Analytical or Complex Psychology,” Page 23.
Jung presented Toni [Wolff] with a revised copy of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido in 1951. Seiner lieben (“To my dearest Toni”) “The author presents to you this child of painful effort born close to the birthday of the invincible sun. ~ Naeff family archives
Mary [Mellon] also planned to include several of Toni Wolff’s essays in the first Bollingen Series, but again, that plan never transpired.11 William Schoenl, CG. Jung: His Friendships, Page 43.
“I hope Mrs. Jung is well and all your family. Please give her my kindest regards and my love to Toni [Wolff].” Mary Mellon, William Schoenl, CG. Jung: His Friendships, Page 43
She [Toni Wolff] is Dr. Jung’s greatest pupil and has for many years helped him in his work by taking many of the patients which he felt himself unsuited to help. I analyzed with her for a good three months. She is very austere, very dignified and severe, but when you get to know her you find she is a most warm and human creature. She is the most important person for you to know, outside of Jung himself. ~ William McGuire, Bollingen, Page 112
From Claridge’s in Brook Street, Paul asked Jung’s secretary whether he [Paul Mellon] could work with Toni Wolff, Jung’s closest associate, during their stay. ~William Schoenl – C.G. Jung-His Friendships with Mary Mellon & J.B. Priestley, Page 5
