My Mother Second Voice
On My Mother’s Second
Voice
June 7, 1957
On this day) C. G. Jung talked about his mother. Since early childhood) and again during significant phases of his adulthood) he had been aware of two personalities in her.
The usually visible one was a warm-hearted) conventional and affable woman) but at decisive moments a second voice with powerful) unassailable authority could emerge) stirring simmering, deep-seated contents in Jung, e.g.) the issue of the anima or his research ambitions.
In January 1958) a few months after this description of his mother’s twofold personality)
C.G. Jung wrote) in “From the Earliest Experiences of My Life) ” about his own twofold personality) calling the two aspects number 1 and number 2.
As a young assistant physician at Burgholzli 3 in Zurich, I lived on Zollikerstrasse.
I was working on the association experiments at the time, and my whole room was plastered with graphs.
One day my mother visited me, with no idea of what I was doing.
She looked around the room and then asked: “What’s all this then?” – “These are the graphs from the experiments I’m working on at the moment.”
I was feeling rather proud of my efforts. But at that point I had no idea yet whether my results would come to anything.
I was just at the point of discovering what the disturbances in the experiments might mean, and assumed they were connected with feeling-toned, autonomously acting complexes.
My mother looked at all the drawings again and suddenly stood up – like a judge – and with her “second” voice asked me: “Well, do you think it could be something?”
My mother rarely spoke in this tone – but when she did, she would intuitively and unexpectedly say something of great significance.
At those times she often hit exactly on an unacknowledged or unconscious feeling of mine.
At sometimes what she said sounded something like an ambiguous oracle.
In this case, I could have taken her question to mean either that I was not valuing my work highly enough, or that I was overestimating its worth.
But in any case, she gave voice to an unrecognized doubt within me.
Her question affected me so much that I could not lift a pen for the next three weeks.
Her words had unflinchingly exposed my own doubts about the importance of my undertaking, and now I asked myself in all seriousness whether what I was doing really made sense.
I always find it hard to accept that my own judgment can deceive me.
My mother, in that very moment, had expressed my own unacknowledged apprehension.
And she did so in that grave serious voice, so different from her usual way of speaking – as if she wanted to make me realize that my work really did have something worthwhile, but at the same
time raise the doubt about whether it amounted to anything.
Almost in the same breath, she added: “I don’t understand any of it!”
It was like a Delphic oracle: “Thus, or just not thus.” Ambiguous and pregnant with meaning like the prophecy: “If you cross the Halys
you will destroy an empire!”
Actually, my mother emphasized the great significance of what was present. ~Carl Jung, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung, Page20-22
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
