1935 15 May LECTURE II Zarathustra Seminar
Prof. Jung:
We have a question by Mrs. Baumann, “Is it au fait to deal with my question about Christ now? I cannot help feeling there is a catch somewhere about Christ being crucified by his virtues, because he did recognize evil by saying, ‘Resist not evil,’ and therefore I should think he was conscious of both extremes.”
It is right to ask this question here, indeed almost inevitable, because the chapter about the pale criminal is part of that whole problem of virtue and evil; if you consider the good in man, you cannot help considering the evil too.
And there is a catch, as you say, in the fact that Christ really never said that he had been crucified by his virtues: that is what medieval fantasy made of it-you remember I showed you a picture where he was being crucified by his virtues.
It is a very curious idea, but that miniature in the medieval codex most certainly shows that it existed, and there is a good deal to say about such an idea.
(We have already said a good deal about it.)
So it is not a contradiction in the logia of Christ, because he never said that; from his point of view he never would have said it.
You are quite right: he said, “Resist not evil.”
One must always make a difference between the logion, the actual word of the Lord himself as given in the tradition, and what people made of it.
If one compares the teaching of the church with the original teaching of Christ himself, one sees that there is most certainly a great difference.
Therefore, it is so difficult, really quite impossible, to have a Protestant church, for that can only be found upon the Word, the Bible; but the New Testament as well as the Old is so full of contradictions that it has no authority.
Such an institution cannot be based upon those contradictory sayings.
So, the Catholic church is quite consistent in the point of view that the Holy Scriptures have no absolute authority because they were compiled a long time after the death of the Master by pupils of his disciples.
They say that Christ is really the founder of the church, which is older than those sacred books.
The Evangels of St. John or Matthew or Luke were not even written by the apostles themselves; the Greek text says kata, according to Matthew or Luke.
Those reports were compiled by one or more people, who were presumably pupils at least of the evangelists, but it is quite questionable whether the Evangel of St. John was connected even so directly with the apostle.
It is very possible that the Evangels have been compilations made in places like Asia Minor or Alexandria for the use of the Christian communities there.
Moreover, it is a fact that in the first century the sacred books were considered only as good and useful literature for Christians to read, and never as infallible divine inspiration.
Of course, the church has the memory of those days so they have put the Bible on the Index, and that is quite right because it is a tempting and contradictory collection of books with very dangerous teachings in them.
The Pope reserves the right of the authentic interpretation; in his official position, according to the dogma of infallibility, he is infallible in his interpretation of the dogma.
Also, the church, since it holds higher authority than the Scriptures, can make dogma; that gives a basis for an authoritative body.
But the sayings of that institution do not necessarily agree with the teachings of Christ himself.
Then here is a question by Mrs. Baynes: “There seems to be a growing conviction in our world that it is heroic to murder for the sake of the cause one is serving, and lily-livered to be held back by the thought of what that means. Has the pathological element in Nietzsche’s idea of the pale criminal helped to foster this point of view?”
Well, it is generally said that Nietzsche was at the bottom of the world war and the new revolution in Germany, and so on.
Nietzsche himself would be highly astonished to hear such news.
He surely never dreamt that he would be called the father of all this modern political evil.
That really comes more from the misunderstanding to which Nietzsche is exposed.
For he made one considerable mistake which of course would not be generally considered a mistake.
But I call it a mistake that he ever published Zarathustra.
That is a book which ought not to be published; it should be reserved for people who have undergone a very careful training in the psychology of the unconscious.
Only then, having given evidence of not being overthrown by what the unconscious occasionally says, should people have access to the book.
For in Zarathustra we have to deal with a partial revelation of the unconscious.
It is full of inspiration, of the immediate manifestation of the unconscious, and therefore should be read with due preparation, with due knowledge of the style and the intentions of the unconscious.
If a man reads Zarathustra unprepared, with all the naive presuppositions of our actual civilization, he must necessarily draw wrong conclusions as to the meaning of the “Superman,” “the Blond Beast,” “the Pale Criminal,” and so on.
And such people will surely draw such conclusions as murder-for-the-sake-of-the-cause.
Many suicides have felt themselves justified by Zarathustra-as any damned nonsense can be justified by Zarathustra.
So it is generally assumed that Nietzsche is at the bottom of a whole host of evils on account of his immoral teaching, while as a matter of fact, Nietzsche himself and his teaching are exceedingly moral, but only to people who really understand how to read it.
You see, it all depends upon what level one speaks from-whether one is talking on the level of the ordinary understanding or of an extraordinary understanding.
Whatever you say on the normal level is understood by all the people who are on that level, but if you say something which really comes from a level underneath as if it belonged to the normal level, then it will be misunderstood.
People will not realize that it comes from the layer below, and that in order to really understand it they themselves should be below.
Of course that is very difficult, because we never reckon with such levels, but in dealing with a product like Zarathustra, we must consider this question.
In that connection there is something which I really must say here.
The general idea is that through analysis one becomes conscious of certain contents which have been hidden in the unconscious hitherto for one reason or another.
And in making these things conscious, you would represent the conscious on one line, and the personal unconscious on the line below, and then the collective unconscious below that.
Now, if you bring some content from the personal unconscious up to the conscious level, say something you have repressed or more or less willfully forgotten, then it would be just like anything else on the conscious level.
For instance, say you are unconscious of the fact that you are very ambitious or that you have considerable will-to-power.
You have believed hitherto that you were a sort of pious lamb with no particular ambition; then through certain experiences or through the benevolent teaching of analysis you become aware that you really have a will-to-power, and are not that pious lamb you were supposed to be.
Thus you lift that will-to-power up to the conscious level and you handle it as something quite reasonable, for it is easy to believe that we are imperfect: it is not unheard of that we should have a certain ambition or sex fantasies or something dark like that.
You see, the admixture of a bit of dark substance to our snow-white conscious innocence is not absurd; you can easily admit that you are of course not perfect, but are generous in sharing the painful details of my little life.
And then the meeting can begin.
With radiant eyes they go about, absolutely redeemed, and sin has vanished from the world, and I have only made a slight mistake.
But they don’t see that I am loading the ship, because if once I stood upon the table to see a girl undressing and had my pleasure there in watching such a performance, I am forever the man who has clone it and it is unforgettable, I am not redeemed by confessing it.
Yes, I can feel you are all the same damned fools that I am; you think you are all
forgiven, but we are all a herd of fools.
But I am never forgiven.
Forever I am the one who has clone it. I am characterized as such, have burdened my ship with that fact.
Forever I shall carry that burden, and I must be careful not to climb too many tables at too many windows or my ship might go under in the end.
Hell! What have I lived? A series of mean tricks.
I am just an ordinary swine-the swine that always repented what he ate, the poor swine that could not even be a proper swine.
One needs must come to that conclusion. Of course I have repented.
That is all right, but nevertheless I have clone those things.
And so one might wake up to the understanding of one’s life, and that would be fatal, because one will have seen that one’s ship has gone under in spite of all confession and repentance.
For by making something conscious one lowers the ship and it keeps on sinking clown the more one puts into it.
Now, if you pull up something of the kind from the personal unconscious, you can say it is quite human, something that really could have been conscious; you can rationalize it, and it is not very visible considering that you put such a weight into the balance of your ship.
But when you fetch something from the collective unconscious, it has a much greater weight, because it has come from much further down, for everything is in the place where it belongs according to its specific weight.
What Nietzsche fetched up was the lead of the water region (according to the Secret of the Golden Flower), and lead is the heaviest metal and therefore at the bottom of the collective unconscious.
So put this in your boat and you will be pulled down into the collective unconscious.
For when two points are in space, it is impossible that only the one attracts the other: both are attracted.
If you lift up a stone from the earth and let it fall, in that moment you would say that the stone was falling and would not assume that the earth was rising; but as a matter of fact if that stone were as big as the moon or the earth itself, it would suddenly appear to you that the earth was attracted to the stone as much as the stone was attracted to the earth.
So when you fetch up the lead of the water region, you will notice quite suddenly that your boat up in the bright regions of reason will be pulled down; you cannot get it up to the top because it is too heavy.
Therefore, we are quite reluctant to bring these heavy things up to the surface; we are afraid of pulling down our boat.
It seems to be dangerous, too great a risk, and we avoid doing it.
We have quite a natural instinct against being conscious of such things; even when it is a small cargo which our boat could easily carry; it is already too heavy.
To be conscious of the fact that we steal or lie or have sexual fantasies would burden us too much.
We had better keep unconscious of those facts; we want to be clear of them and remain floating in the region of the white clouds.
Of course, the higher up you are, the more you lose your body, the more you lose yourself, the more unreal you become; and finally you are just a sort of smoke floating in the sky, and that is no human existence.
So you are forced to overcome your unconscious, to make these things conscious; but inasmuch as you make them conscious your ship comes down further, and if you become acquainted with the collective unconscious, you are pulled even further under.
You may still be laboring under the impression that you can lift something up to
consciousness and that the level of your consciousness will not be affected, that on the contrary, it will be increased, improved-but that is an illusion; if you lift up those contents approaching the lead of the water region, your consciousness will go down.
That is an inexorable fact which must be taken into consideration.
Of course it is the secret meaning of life, one could say, that the lead of the water region should be lifted up.
For you must make gold of it; you must transform matter by penetrating it.
If you don’t penetrate space or time, you are still half born, still wandering about in the collective unconscious in a prenatal state.
And then the real purpose of the unknown creator that is behind your existence has not come off; he wanted you to penetrate space and time in order to transform the lead, but you buried your talent and have not done it, and you fade away before you have accomplished anything.
But if you can lift up the lead of the water region, you really fulfil the task; and whether your consciousness is on this level or that, or on a still deeper level, is relatively unimportant in comparison with the fulfilment of the task.
Of course, the deeper down the level of consciousness goes, the more you are threatened by the unconscious, by becoming engulfed in the sea, and that should not be, for it means that you have gone under, the lead of the water region has overcome you and the experiment has not come off.
But if you can just keep afloat, you have accomplished the task; then you will land somewhere in between.
So the symbol of perfection, or the self in the human being, was to the old masters nothing volatile or light, but a stone or a metal.
Therefore they say about the philosopher’s stone, which is the symbol of the self, lapis est media res inter corpora perfecta et imperfecta: the lapis philosophorum is not the perfect body, but is in the middle, between the perfect and the imperfect bodies.
You would expect it to be among the perfect bodies, but the perfect bodies are up on the conscious level and that is not the real middle position.
Nietzsche is no longer concerned with a personal unconscious; that chapter about the Pale Criminal clearly shows it.
He is here concerned with the evil of mankind, with universal humanity as it is represented in himself, and therefore one can say he is concerned with the collective unconscious; the Pale Criminal is a form in the collective unconscious, the criminal is everybody.
Now, inasmuch as he is concerned with that, he undergoes naturally the dangers of those who deal with such matters.
But he labors under the assumption that he is on top, that he has a reasonable consciousness, that he can make it visible and understandable; and he tries to bring up the lead of the water region.
His Pale Criminal is lead, an ignoble substance, and in bringing it up he has the illusion that he keeps the level of consciousness.
He does not see that he gets immersed and really sinks insofar as he brings it up.
So he talks on this lower level.
Of course there is an infinite number of possible levels; he talks now on the level of people who have contacted the collective unconscious, and they speak a different language.
If people on the normal conscious level hear it, they draw conclusions which are typical for that level; only the people who hear him on the lower level have the right understanding because they know about that kind of thing.
They will draw the conclusions, not of the world above, but of the world of the shadow.
On the conscious level, everybody knows what a criminal is; if you don’t know, you take an encyclopedia and look up the chapter about crime, or any handbooks of laws, and they show you.
But from the level below, the criminal is something quite different, no longer a statistical or social or juristic phenomenon, nothing reasonable or rational, but a psychological concept.
Therefore, it is already a symbolic concept; it is a concept of the twilight, in the region of the penombre where things have two sides, the sun side and the moon side.
The leading principle above is the sun, and below it is the moon; and whatever is between is in two lights, the light of the sun and the light of the moon.
So when someone speaks of crime or the criminal on the lower level, he is conscious of crime from such an aspect; it is a twilight concept, and only people who have experienced the shadow can really understand what he is talking about.
But if he makes the mistake of coming out into the daylight, into the broad street, and talking as if he were on the first level-and then having the whole thing printed so that
every jackass can buy and read it-of course people will read him as they read the newspaper or any other obvious thing.
And they will be horrified.
Freud made the same mistake in speaking of things on the unconscious level.
He should explain; he should say, “Come, let us go down several steps into the twilight world where things have that aspect.”
Then everybody could admit incest quite easily.
But in the everyday world that is a horrible thing, impossible; the police will catch hold of you and you will be put into jail or the lunatic asylum for it.
Also, people from the unconscious level make the mistake of assuming a sort of benignant attitude, and talking as if they were really on a level above, when they are not, but below.
Of course, the deeper down you go the worse it becomes; to talk on the topmost level of something brought up from the collective unconscious is to make the most horrible mistake.
You see, Nietzsche, in trying to bring something up from this level, could say he had certain tendencies that were discernible: he might steal, he might lie, or even commit a crime.
That is more or less understandable on the upper level, as I said.
He might say it was his particular psychology, or write a confession like St. Augustine or Rousseau, freely confessing what a sinner he was.
Then people would be agreeably shocked: “How marvelous that people can do such things!”-they themselves of course being not concerned at all.
That would be possible: you can speak on this level as a personal confession.
But Nietzsche is no longer talking from the level of his personal unconscious; he talks
of the crime of man, and then everybody is in it.
But then he can only have bad results from his teaching.
People will say, “If one is a criminal in a good cause, why not? One is a hero-Nietzsche did it, so why not?
But here it is not even twilight.
It is already the great night, and those are the things which can only be taught in secret.
Therefore, the more dangerous teachings, the more questionable or profound teachings, were always told in the form of mysteria.
One finds these ideas in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians: “These things must be
taught in secret and woe unto those who speak of them in the daytime, thus betraying the mysteries.”
Such people are always injured or killed.
They injure themselves by bringing such matter up to the light.
Not realizing that they are already dragged down by the weight, they expose themselves in a most unfortunate way to people on the normal level, who suddenly discover that they are really from below and look down upon them.
So what happens on this level is still more dangerous, still more mistaken; it has not even two sides.
Whoever is on the level of the personal unconscious has still a sort of luminosity on top
from the sun, but down below it is all moonshine: treacherous, poisonous, evil, not to be trusted.
And if you expose this thing on a higher level, you are not only exposed but a victim also.
That is what Nietzsche does, not realizing at all.
He is quite naïve about it: to produce that chapter about the Pale Criminal is really a tremendous naivete.
And probably you have noticed that it is profoundly disturbing because it is true, but it should not be told in the daylight, but only told in the night under the seal of secrecy.
This idea was by no means strange to Nietzsche.
In another place he speaks of the secret teaching in the temples, and how the initiants were put through many degrees in their initiation, harder and harder, always more cruel and more difficult, complete abnegation and mortification and God knows what; and then comes the last ceremony where the grand master himself receives the initiant who of course expects something extraordinary.
But the grand master says, “Everything is allowed. Before, everything was forbidden but now everything is allowed.”
And that means complete licentiousness.
This is of course a legend, but it has a kernel of truth: namely, it reverses the values of consciousness, exchanges the values of consciousness for their opposite, absolute shadow.
Of course, for that to be said on the surface is criminal, but five hundred or a thousand meters down in the depths, it is a truth.
But we cannot imagine what kind of truth it is because we don’t know how things look at that depth; it is a truth of the darkness.
There are really organized mysteries in which the ultimate teaching is of such a nature; therefore the principle of these mysteries-I am now quoting facts, this is not my
imagination-is: Gloria dei est celare verbum, meaning, it is the glory of God to conceal the word.
That is the motto of the highest degree of Knights Templars, a contradiction of the more Christian ideas in the lower stages.
We say the glory of God is to preach the word; our mysteries are called sacramenta, which means the mysteries of the divine word, and to preach the word is our duty.
Yet in the highest degree of initiation it is the glory of God to hide the word. And why?
Because, bring it up and the people will be dumbfounded-and worse, they will be misled.
That comes from the same fact which we are here dealing with, that the author of such a book does not realize where he himself stands.
In Zarathustra, Nietzsche was already somewhere in the collective part of his unconscious.
The Genealogy of Morals and his Aphorisms, for instance, would come more from the personal level; it is possible still to be intellectual and rational there, as Freud has shown.
But when it comes to the profounder points, like incest, Freud just reaches the collective level where things have a different meaning and aspect; yet he talks of them naively and thus makes a fatal mistake: he betrays the secrets to infants, which always has the worst of effects.
Therefore, my idea is that Zarathustra should not have been published, but should have been worked over and carefully concealed, perhaps put in a form-in spite of all the beauty in it-more or less like his aphoristic writings, because of the evil or morbid influence such a book can have.
Just that chapter about the Pale Criminal has a poisonous influence because it makes a really impossible thing quite palatable, and the result is that one is in a mist.
Well, that, to my idea, is a very important point of view whenever you deal with matters of the collective unconscious; touching the personal unconscious already changes you and touching the collective unconscious changes you all the more: you are a different being, and no longer like the people who have not touched it.
That does not mean that you are better.
On the contrary, you are worse, because from their point of view you are on a lower level; and if you talk from a higher level it is just bluff and you add to your burden by lying and cheating and trying to make a good impression.
So one can only recommend the utmost of discretion and tact in the understanding of the level of other people.
Of course, in Nietzsche’s case you cannot make him responsible: he was utterly overcome by the unconscious and he did not realize that he was lower down than his time.
On the contrary, he assumed that he was higher up, that he was light and easy and marvelous; therefore, he speaks of dancing and flying as a compensation for the fact that he was really weighed down.
If you are concerned with lead, you naturally realize what lightness is and are likely to make the mistake he made. In his letters, for instance, he says that thought never is difficult to him; it jumps ready-made out of his head as Pallas once jumped from the head of Zeus.
Yet on the next page he complains bitterly about his terrible migraines when working; he doesn’t make the connection, as he doesn’t understand why he feels particularly light when he is weighed down by lead.
Now we have another question to deal with, by Dr. Schlegel: “You told us in a quite convincing way that there is no redemption in confessing oneself.
Would you, in that connection, deal with the problem of the possibility of redemption (Suhne) by suffering in the sense of punishment (Strafe)?”
The idea is, you never can get away from the fact that you are the one who has done a certain thing; that is an absolutely indestructible fact and no repentance in the world will ever change it.
Now, that being true, you never can live another life than that of a man who has done that thing; inasmuch as it is a general fact that a man who had done it will have such and such a life, you have to expect such a life.
If you commit a crime, then you are that man who is called a criminal and the criminal’s life is such and such: he will be caught, he will be punished, and he will undergo suffering.
So you expect suffering, and if it doesn’t come, then you yourself have not found the answer which you expected of life.
Of course, it sounds absurd when you put it in this way, but reverse the picture: say you do something really good-then you are the good man who has done the good thing and such a man rightly expects gratification or recognition.
He supposes that the good will be followed by certain compensation, and if they don’t happen, he is disappointed; he feels frustrated.
You see, doing a good thing is, dynamically, exactly the same as doing a bad thing, as from the standpoint of the unconscious, love and hatred are identical-dynamically identical: the one is positive and the other negative.
In nature it is exactly the same whether electricity is positive or negative, and so to the unconscious it is the same; nature is concerned with the dynamism of things.
Of course to us, it makes all the difference in the world whether a thing is good or bad; but any effect would be equivalent to the good or the bad you produce, and you expect the sequence.
You accept naturally the consequence, the effect that follows a good or bad deed; if
that does not follow, you are frustrated.
You have not received what life really owes you.
So it is unnatural if crime is not followed by suffering and punishment, and it is unnatural if good is not followed by gratification and recognition.
We feel under a certain moral obligation to be grateful to somebody who does good, as we are compelled to an adverse reaction against somebody who does wrong.
That is simply inescapable.
We cannot reverse the picture and punish the one who is doing good.
It is impossible-only crazy people could do that.
And it is equally impossible to reverse the conclusion in the other case.
For the sake of normal psychological life, the good deed ought to be followed by gratitude or something of the sort, by a true recognition or compensation; and the same in the opposite case.
Then only do you feel: this is right.
Suppose somebody has done something very good, for example, and is then compensated by public recognition; then, though you have not contributed to it yourself, you feel that to be a perfectly satisfactory expression of your own feeling: it is very nice that recognition has been given to that individual.
Therefore you have, and you ought to have, the opposite reaction in the case of crime.
When you hear that a man who has committed a terrible crime is sentenced to prison for life, or even has to undergo capital punishment, you cannot help feeling that it is right, the true answer.
And since I look at these things, perhaps, from a very irrational standpoint, the balance of the dynamis of psychological events, I think the natural order would be disturbed if we ceased to give recognition to good and evil.
There must be an equivalent recognition.
For instance, that modern standpoint where a man commits a crime and a very enlightened alienist comes along and says he could not help himself, that he is just a degenerate individual and should be put into a sanitorium where he will be well fed and taken care of and even enjoy a certain amount of liberty: that is not quite satisfactory-it is a worse answer as a matter of fact.
Because you put yourself on a much higher level and regard him as pathological, a degenerate individual, you can only put him to bed without caring for the fact that he has murdered a little child or tortured some other being to death.
That is really not satisfactory.
People’s natural reaction is: “Those damned alienists! Now we must feed him in a lunatic asylum where he can stuff his belly and have a good time and smoke cigars at the expense of the state!
And they are right, it is true.
Perhaps this is a very sinful point of view, I don’t know, but I feel that is simply a straightforward statement about human psychology, and how else can we judge of these things than by human psychology?
Dr. Schlegel: Thank you. The standpoint of modern criminology is really quite a rational one. It denies the Vergeltung.
Prof Jung: Of course. The Vergeltung is compensation already, a sort of revenge.
That is the only true point of view from the standpoint of psychology.
I quite agree that my point of view from the standpoint of Christian morality and of reason is very sinful, yet I am convinced that this is the only right and true standpoint.
It always has been true and it will be true forever: that we feel under a certain obligation to be grateful to the one who does the good deed, and if that is the case we must always punish the evil.
Mrs. Baumann: Perhaps some of the confusion in the world today comes from the fact that the good deeds seem to turn out to be bad, and perhaps a crime might turn out to be a good thing.
Prof Jung: That is possible, but it does not hinder our considering it a crime, and then we punish it.
Of course I admit that somebody might be doing a great good to humanity which his time understands as a great evil; we have plenty of such cases in medicine.
We have observed more than once that the people who introduced new methods have been persecuted as being the worst enemies of mankind.
People were put into prison for dissecting corpses, for instance; they really were
benefitting mankind, but it was not understood and so their good was considered to be a crime.
And it was in a way a crime for that time too because they were criminally naive about it; they should have known to what time they were talking.
It is criminal to put a bottle of digitalis into the hands of a little child as a plaything, for instance.
It might save your life by helping your heart along, or might mean rescue to a man with heart disease, but if a child drinks that medicine, it dies.
You must always take into consideration to whom you are speaking; it is a criminal
disregard to talk certain verities to babies.
One of the main considerations in analysis is that one tries to understand to whom one is talking, and that is exceedingly difficult; one is always in danger of saying too much or too little.
So a thing which in itself was really good, one would say from a later more enlightened point of view was at that time bad, because it was brought out into the open in a naive and very disregardful way.
Mrs. Crowley: May I ask a question in regard to the treatment of the criminal? Would you not say that was influenced by a transforming process in a historical sense, just as other collective attitudes are? If we are attempting to outgrow the medieval attitude in our relation to life, why maintain a system of punishment that belongs to the Middle
Ages? If, for example, our rational age has begun to produce certain codes or standards of decency, how in the treatment of the criminal can we revert to barbaric practices that belong to the days of dungeons? Does not the law of development or transformation apply here too?
Prof. Jung: Surely there would be a development, but the development into rationalism is to me no development.
It would be a development if we could produce criminals with a moral sense; we would
then arrest them and bring them before the judge who would say, “Now Mr. So-and-So, I am very sorry, but I must tell you that you have done something which really should not be done; you have hurt the feelings of all the decent citizens and I must politely beg you not to do such a thing again.”
Now if the criminal is so far developed that he is deeply humiliated by that, so that he really promises never to do such a thing again, that would work.
But we must first produce decent criminals.
You see, it all depends whether the prisoner is of a coarse structure or not: the punishment must be according to the nature of the criminal.
There is a considerable progress in the postponement of punishment; every reasonable being would agree, when somebody has lost his head and committed a crime, that he did it in a sort of panic, and therefore we must be reasonable and postpone punishment.
I think that is progress or evolution, but one should make it clear that the punishment is merely postponed, and if the swine commits such a crime again, we will lay him by the heels and he will then undergo the whole severity of the law.
That is sound.
But to improve the lot of the prisoner is I am afraid very sentimental; even the prisoners do not approve.
The real criminal makes fun of this leniency in punishment.
Mrs. Crowley: Many of our modern prisoners have the same conditions as in the Middle Ages.
Prof. Jung: Yes, one cannot hinder that kind of development; surely one will make the prisons hygienic so that the prisoner can really last fifteen years.
It would be too bad if he should die in the third year of his punishment.
You have no idea what it is to be in prison really, how hellish it is to condemn a man to that for twenty-five years.
It is much better to condemn him to death right away. So it is cruelty anyhow on principle.
For instance, the murderer of the Empress Elizabeth had confessed the murder-it was absolutely clear-so they put him into prison alone where he dies after six years.
It was a very cruel punishment to be entirely alone for six years.
Now, perhaps, the hygienic conditions were not of the best so that he was infected by tuberculosis and died soon; if it had been a very good prison he would have lasted
thirty years and the punishment would have been drawn out.
I should prefer to die. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 474-488