Carl Jung: Emma Jung dreamt tonight that she was operated on by me.
- V. 1927
Today an American patient Jerome Schloss suddenly died of heart paralysis (aneurysm?)
- V. Funeral. Must give the funeral oration.
3r. V. Since then an atmosphere of much disturbance, like after Sigg’s and Porter’s death.
Dream: (30/ 31 V) Emma had an abdominal pain.
1) I operate together with a surgeon
2) We discover a spread carcinoma growth.
3) Inoperable and hopeless. I am terribly shocked. She must still suffer for a long time, until death comes.
1.) In the last days I’ve thought about her death and mine. Generally vague anxiety.
2.) Walthard. Gynecologist. Operated on Mrs. Sigg. Personally unknown. Emma dreamt tonight that she was operated on by me, and in another dream, that a corpse would be dissected, from which she had to vomit (in the dream).
3.) Probably from the pancreas-like my father.
4.) My suffering in recent times-essentially through the strengthening of the Unc. Have got Dyshydrosis on my hands, like my father.
Why do you torture me? It undoubtedly comes from you. What do you know? Come and speak!
“I don’t like speaking.”
So that you can probably act better?
“Yes, I fill you with disgust.”
So that I don’t crush you?
“You harm yourself through this.”
That shouldn’t stop me. But I doubt whether this is the right way.
“Naturally it’s the incorrect one.”
You are too quick to agree with me. But I suspect that you greatly exaggerate certain feelings in me and certainly in fact far beyond all probabilities, so that a suffering arises that I can no longer tolerate. You know that I absolutely refuse to take part in suffering beyond a certain reasonable limit. In all conscience I won’t let myself be rushed. By the way, can you tell me just for once by what right you torment me? Speak up!
“Mysteries, my dear, mysteries!”
I want no mysteries. Please share with me what I must know.
“This I don’t do.”
You probably can’t. It has probably also taken hold of you. You come to me too much in the human world. What is this abominably unfavorable dream?
“You wish the death of your wife, no?”
You gallows bird, stop your monkey chatter. If that were so, I could also say it. I have also said as much to myself. It is already thanks to you that I must say that to myself, so that I can see that you’re behind this, snaring me in delusions. I don’t want to start over, but I want to outgrow life.
I no longer let myself get caught up in life. Turn yourself to the inner, to the dark, and watch the images of life, instead of coveting the world. What does my dream mean? Is my marriage hopeless and inoperable? No, I don’t think so. I know that there is nothing to be done, and what I always suffer from must be suffered, as one bears an incurable disease. ~The Black Books, Vol. VII, Page 241-242
Jerome Edward Schloss was born on August 28, 1876, in Maryland, to Joseph Schloss and Fredericka Schloss.
His father was German.
In 1902, he married Hannah Wiener in New York.
The United States census of 1910 has him working as a manufacturer of neckwear in New York. According to his US Army draft registration of May 1918, he was tall and slender and worked as a salesman for Louis Adler, a garment manufacturer and real estate developer on Broadway.
He was· counted in the 1925 New York census.
According to the American Consular Service’s Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, he died of heart failure on May 22 and was cremated. His and his wife’s address was given as Pension Quisisana on Dufourstrasse in Zurich (information from various genealogical
sources) .
His wife wrote cookbooks, and her Short Cuts and Left-Overs of 1938 was a bestseller. In his funeral oration for Jerome Schloss, Jung wrote:
To many death seems to be a brutal and meaningless end to a short and meaningless existence.
So it looks, if seen from the surface and from the darkness.
But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness- it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life.
Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime.
In the youthful expansion of our life we think of it as an ever-increasing river, and the conviction accompanies us often far beyond the noonday of our existence.
But if we listen to quieter voices of our deeper nature we become aware of the fact that soon after the middle of life the soil begins its secret work, getting ready for the departure.
Out of the turmoil and terror of our life the one precious flower of the spirit begins to unfold, the four-pedaled flower of the immortal light, and even if our mortal consciousness should not be aware of its secret operation, it nevertheless does its secret work of purification.
When I met J. S. for the first time I found in him a man of rare clarity and purity of character and personality.
I was deeply impressed with the honesty and sincerity of his purpose. And when I worked with him, helping to understand the intricacies of the human psyche, I could not help but admire the kindness of his feeling and the absolute truthfulness of his mind.
But though it was a privilege to teach a man of such rare human qualities, it was not the thing that touched me most.
Yes, I did teach him, but he taught
me too.
He spoke to me in the eternal language of symbols, which I did not grasp until the awe-inspiring conclusion, the culmination in death, became manifest.
I shall never forget how he liberated his mind from the turmoil of modern business life, and how, gradually working back, he freed himself from the bonds that held him fast to his earthly parents and to his youth; and how the eternal image of the soul appeared to him, first dimly, then slowly taking shape in the vision of his dreams, and how finally, three weeks before his death, he beheld the vision of his sarcophagus from which his living soul arose.” (CW 18, §§ r705ff.) .
The typescript of Jung’s oration is dated May 25 (archives of the San Francisco Jung Institute). ~The Black Books, Vol. VII, Page 241-242, fn 268
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