Jung stayed on Harley Street, where he presented seminars to his first group of students in England.
The group included Maurice Nicoll and James Young.
On July 4 he presented a talk on “The psychological foundations of belief in spirits” at the Society for Psychical Research (CW 8); he repeated it at the Psychological Club on October 4.
On July II he presented “On the problem of psychogenesis in mental disease” (CW 3) at the psychiatry section of the Royal Society of Medicine, at the invitation of William McDougall, and on July 12 he presented “Instinct and the unconscious” at a joint meeting of the British Psychological Society, the Aristotelian Society, and the Mind Association (CW 8).
On the weekends, he went to stay at a cottage at Cranwell Farm, near Waddeston Manor, Aylesbury, which had been rented by Nicoll, Young, and Maud Hoffman.
In a letter to Emma, he drew the farm (see The Art of C.G. Jung, p. 149 ). In 1950, he wrote up his experiences as a contribution to Fanny Moser’s Ghosts: False Belief or True Belief? (CW 18, §§ 757ff.)
He had unexpected difficulty sleeping at Cranwell Farm and heard strange sounds and smelled odd odors. He had the impression that there was an animal running around.
The smell reminded him of the memory of an old woman at the Burgholzli who suffered from an open carcinoma.
On one occasion he woke up: “There beside me on the pillow, I saw the head of an old woman, and the right eye, wide open, glared at me. The left half of the face was missing below the eye.”
He learned that the house had a reputation for being haunted.
In his “Dreams,” he noted,
“In England staying in a haunted house. First saw the left half of a face of an old woman. Then all sorts of sounds. Paralysing fear, sleeplessness, suddenly subsiding in other room. Then saw Toni half materialized.”
In 1950, he conjectured that “The vision had the character of a hypnagogic hallucination and was probably a reconstruction of the memory of the old woman with carcinoma.”
The smells could have been intuiting something about the previous inhabitants. There was a dripping noise he couldn’t explain.
The house was later pulled down, as it apparently scared away all tenants.
Nicoll recalled that they often painted watercolors in the garden room: “you told us how to paint symbolically.”
Kenneth Walker remembered a “Mithraic Altar that Dr. Jung had painted, in tones of blue, with two figures, evidently the torch-bearers.”
Elystan Miles recalled “Dr. Jung’s painting of the Soul
taking the Middle Way, a small figure of a man toiling along a narrow dangerous path, a high mountain one side, a precipice on the other-full of dramatic color.”
Nicoll also recalled that Jung “told me a lot about the possibilities of psycho-material-transformation-i.e., if a man puts his psychic genius into a bit of wood, the wood stands up to him and in fact it is an example of psycho-transformism” (cited in Beryl Pogson, Maurice Nicoll: A Portrait [New York: Fourth Way Books, 1987], pp. 63- 66).
It was at this time that Jung carved two wooden figures of Atmavictu.
On his return to Switzerland, he commissioned a sculptor to make a model in plaster and then a stone sculpture, which he placed by the lakeshore at his house in Kusnacht (see The Art of C.G. Jung, pp. 148-50). ~The Black Books, Vol. VII, Page 199-200, fn 137