…so it was really Mrs. Crowley’s animus speaking through Mr. Crowley.
Jung My Mother and I by Jane Cabot Reid
June 21, 1935 (Longest day)
This interview was so astounding and so profound that I can hardly write about it for it has made the most tremendous impression on me, and I am ‘afraid.’ (I say ‘afraid’ because one is afraid of changes.)
He has changed the whole course of my life.
Dr. Jung first asked me if I had finally understood what he meant by not feeling through the ear. I told him it had permeated, and that Tommy had helped me understand it.
Jung said, “De T. has a very good mind; even though he knows nothing of psychology, he is able to express a psychological problem to you in simple terms.”
I then told him of my transference to Wolff and how I hated her saying she was not seeing me again, and how I finally asked her to dinner; that at first she was cold then said she would come. Jung said that Wolff had certainly released my feeling.
I then asked him why Mr. Crowley had an ANIMUS, and I went on to say that despite the fact that he might think me queer I was determined to hold to it that Mr. Crowley had an animus!!
He said indeed it was true and that he had saddled himself with Mrs. Crowley’s animus, so it was really Mrs. Crowley’s animus speaking through Mr. Crowley.
He said that when they first came to him they were the most extraordinary couple he’d ever seen and that he saw from the beginning that they would have to part.
He laughed when I told him how Mr. Crowley’s animus conversed viz: “Mrs. C. and I met up here [in the clouds]; now we are down on the mountain top and I’m dragging her down – it’s an angel tied to a pig and the pig has left the angel up there and gone to wallow in mud.” etc. etc.!!
How Jung laughed!
Then I read Jung the Juanita fantasy: Juanita lives for gaiety, marries and finally returns to gaiety then leaves and goes into a convent, saying good-bye to her husband and all the things of this world.
After I had finished reading it Jung looked pretty serious for he realized that I had touched on something pretty fundamental in myself.
He said that, as a child, I had been so fed up with my parents’ language, I had made myself deaf so as not to hear, so it could not reach my heart, otherwise I would have been too unhappy.
He said that often a child can stand parents another child could not stand because he has learnt to live with them by growing defenses.
I grew a rhinoceros hide over my heart so none of my parents’ avalanches could reach me.
It was a defense which grew thicker and thicker as the years went on.
When my parents said things, it went in one ear and out the other.
He said I was like two sisters, the one ran away into the desert.
The other stayed as a mold of parents and had the panics. Something in me would not persuade me into life.
He said that he long suspected that, as I returned year after year to Zurich, I was looking for the ascetic way of life.
He knew I must be interested in the subject I was studying, not in him personally.
If I returned year after year to Zurich, I said, with tears, that it was because I had found a gold mine here, and once having seen it, I could never look away and I had to keep coming to Zurich.
He said that my neurosis did not warrant my sticking on as I had done. I said that I did not want to go into a convent.
He said, “Naturally not.”
I said I thought monks and nuns were not human, and he replied, “Are people very human after all?”
He added that one may be looking for a plane that was not the futile society plane that one was pushed into.
As a child I had covered my heart with rhino hide so that my parents could not hurt me.
Jung said I must answer people back, like Hannah, when they are rude.
As a child I did not dare answer back to my parents as that would have been unwise, and now I have adopted the same attitude with others.
I was forced into a way of life completely foreign to my desires.
Certain desires, like my desire for asceticism, were repressed in childhood and reappear in me as a neurosis; that is to say, the unconscious forces are attempting to achieve conscious expression!
That is clear.
All this is something I have vaguely felt, and suspected, but until now it has not been brought home to me, and I feel shattered and afraid of a new way of life. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 99-101
