Katy Cabot: I said that Mrs. Baumann was only a cold intellectual.
June 17, 1935
I told Dr. Jung that a dream I had, and the stuff I wrote, showed me up to Miss Wolff as vulgar and commonplace, and yet I did not mind that very much and said to myself, “le m ‘en. fiche [I don’t care] if I am vulgar or not.”
He said, “Let’s hear the dream.”
And I told it to him: I was having an earache, and Mrs. Baumann suggested I have an operation performed on my ear.
I took the man she suggested – a valet – a vulgar man. He performed a bloodless painless operation.
Later he performed an operation on the other ear. I asked how he sterilized his instruments.
My night nurse, a Boston hairdresser, said that because he was sexually pure he sterilized his instruments with semen!
Dr. Jung went on to say that the ears had to do with ‘hearing,’ and that ‘obedience’ in German was Gehorsam -to hear is to obey.
A Harig [bondsman] belongs like a slave to a feudal lord, and also comes from hearing.
A Harig hears his master’s voice: he takes it unto himself and follows it.
The trouble is in my ears for I don’t ‘get’ the feeling understanding through my ears; there is trouble with my emotional understanding.
I see more than I hear.
I can’t get the ‘feeling’ nuance in seeing, but due to my Pa’s terrible avalanche of words, I am a bit deaf.
My ears ought to be operated on, and it is done by a vulgar person – a magical operation with semen, impregnating me through the ear.
An old idea that the Virgin conceived through the ear, Suepem aurum conceptis. (She conceived the word, and hearing the voice of the Lord, took it into her heart.)
I try too much to think intellectually, and I do not allow the feeling to go with it.
I do not link up the feeling with what I actually hear. I hear words and try to think them.
A simple mind should come and operate on my ears so that it will reach my heart and not my brain. When I listen to what people say, I grasp it intellectually and not with my heart.
Jung said it was as if he told a man that he was ‘not thinking clearly,’ or something similar, and the man then goes home and looks up a medical diagram of the head and wonders where the proboscis is on his brain which prevents him from thinking clearly.
I said that Mrs. Baumann was only a cold intellectual.
He rather caught me up on that, and said, “Mrs. Baumann understands analysis better than anyone in an intellectual way.”
I felt snubbed as I had rather tried to belittle Mrs. Baumann.
It is an intellectual conclusion that I ought to have a pure mind so as to hear the feeling part too.
That is (the feeling) that I don’t get correctly, for I have been badly poisoned in my hearing by my father’s bad language, so I don’t get the feeling side of things through my ears.
My intellect is not a great or reliable function, but it is not so prejudiced, while my hearing is badly prejudiced.
He repeated that I do not get the feeling aspect of things, I take in things intellectually.
On the contrary, I thought, I took them in with feeling.
He said that an idiot, who has no intellect, can be frightfully intellectual and can miss the feeling values just as much!
A person can be prejudiced by an intellectual way of understanding. I take things in intellectually, for when a thing is black then it is black and that is that.
For instance, I say, “That must be difficult if Dr. Jung thinks so hard over it and how to explain it clearly to me.”
Someone who hears would say that I must be dull if I don’t understand the effort Dr. Jung is malting to get me to understand what he is driving at.
He is putting into it great effort and kindness to help me, and if I don’t get that with my feeling, then I have a ‘feeling dullness.’
I must Hear the feeling behind the words and get the rhythm of it, the intensity of it.
Unfortunately, all that has been poisoned in me by Pa. If one is kind to me, I don’t get the particular quality of feeling, or on the tympanum of the ear, so I don’t hear properly anymore.
It does not have to be personal stuff one gets feeling with, but can be what Jung, or other people, say on political events etc., which are interesting, apart from the personal.
For instance, a person can give you a modest bunch of flowers, and they have personal value, and another can give you diamonds, but they have no value as there is no personal relationship there.
Jung said that he could well understand that I could get the beauty and feelings in paintings, as that comes through the eyes and not through the ears.
I asked Jung not to leave me hanging on the jibet [sic], so he said he would see me Friday at twelve.
He was most sympathetic as I left and said, “If you hear the right way you will hear the unconscious and what it is trying to tell you.”
Before I talked with him about the foregoing, I asked him what he meant when he said that Hindenburg was the symbol of the ‘Old Wise Man’ to the German people, without the wisdom.
He said then that Hindenburg was a very simple soul and that once out of military affairs he did what he was told by the politicians.
There is a story that a man went to see him and waited for hours; finally, he took his lunch out of a paper and ate it, leaving the paper lying on the table just as Hindenburg entered.
Hindenburg took the paper and signed it!!
Later his secretary said to this man, “You must never leave a paper lying around, for he signs all the papers he sees.”
Another time Hitler, Gobbels and Goring went to a restaurant and met Hindenburg, and he signed the menu!
I asked Jung how it was that Hitler had such power over the German people.
He said it was because he spoke to the Unconscious – for instance he would say, “We need an army,” … “We are being oppressed by foreign powers … ” etc. and in their hearts was the answering cry: “He is right, we are oppressed – we do need an army” etc.
I suggested that Hitler had been cruel – murdering and decapitating women etc.
Once they told him he must not leave the League of Nations.
He shut himself up for three days in his room, and at the end came out pale and shaken, and said: “We shall leave the League of Nations.”
Jung said he doubted whether Hitler was homosexual, but that friends of his who knew Hitler said that he was – or at least they strongly suspected he was. ~Katy Cabot, Jung My Mother and I, Page 94-97
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