Image: The Ugly Duchess (also known as A Grotesque Old Woman) is a satirical portrait painted by the Flemish artist Quentin Matsys around 1513.
There is one significant Anima figure who Dr. Jung truly loved which is absent from “Jung in Love.”
Now I ought to preface my comment by stating that when I refer to “Love” I am speaking in terms above the most common connotation of “Sexual” and/or “Lustful.”
The Anima figure I am referring to is a Schizophrenic patient Dr. Jung treated during his apprentice years at the Burgholzli Asylum by the name of Babette S..
By all accounts from Dr. Jung’s colleagues, including Dr. Freud, Babette was “phenomenally ugly”
Babette was considered to be “ completely demented and given to saying the craziest things which made no sense at all” with Dr. Freud expressing what many thought in 1908 that “what you have found out about this patient is certainly interesting. But how in the world were you able to bear spending hours and days with this phenomenally ugly female?”
But Dr. Jung did treat Babette and learned much from her and devoted a significant amount of her story over half a century later in ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Pages 114-145
Late in his life Dr. Jung discussed Babette with Laurens Van Der Post who writes of this touching love in his: “Jung and the Story of Our Time.”
“But the feminine spirits that led Jung on his first essays were not beautiful at all: We have seen one representative already described by Freud as a “phenomenally ugly female” and she was by no means the only one.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 160
“Over the years Jung spent many hours with her and I was always impressed how what must have been his compassion for her in the first instance had been transformed into genuine affection if not love for her, judging by the clarity and warmth with which he remembered her in his own old age. Though he came to her too late to cure. her, he told me he learned far more from her than from any of his colleagues.” ~Laurens Van Der Post, “Jung and the Story of Our Time, Page 113
One day, it is my hope, that a book could be devoted to this extraordinary living example of love. ~Lewis Lafontaine