Time Out Before Marriage: Paris and Oxford
October 4, 1957
At the end of September 1957, Kurt Wolff visited Zurich and read some of my notes for the first time.
He requested that Jung add more about the role of art, music and literature in his life.
He was also interested in hearing Jung describe his relationship to some of the paintings hanging in his house in Kusnacht.
A Jew days later, Jung was ready to talk to me about these subjects.
When I was in high school, I often visited the Basel art collection.
I already admired Holbein and Bocldin, even then, and I loved the old Dutch masters.
People in Basel at that time were very interested in art, thanks to the influence of Jakob Burckhardt.
Later I started my own collection of old etchings, including some pieces by Boucher and some early German color woodcuts.
An etching and a woodcut by Durer are among them.
When I was in Paris in 1902, I spent hours ambling around the bouquinistes’ stalls and bought a few things.
That is where I stumbled across the Diirer engraving.
For a whole year I dedicated myself almost exclusively to art.
That was before I returned to Burgholzli after my “sabbatical” – later on I no longer had enough free time.
I had taken up my duties at Burgholzli at the age of twenty-five, straight after passing the state examination for medicine in 1900.
In fall 1902, I took a break from my post and went first to Paris for six months and then to England for two months.
In Paris I attended lectures by Janet at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, but I did not know him personally. Charcot was already dead by then.
I did meet Binet in person, but nobody else apart from him.
I also visited the asylums and a few hospitals.
At that time the French were at the forefront of psychiatry and I was well-versed in the French literature on the subject.
But as far as possible, I put medicine to the side.
Instead I immersed myself in the museums and soaked up the art.
I went to the Louvre almost every day and gazed innumerable times at La Gioconda and paintings by the Italian renaissance artists.
I enjoyed chatting to the copyists there and had a copy of a Frans Hals done.
I also commissioned a copy of Ghirlandaio’s painting Vieillesse et Jeunesse as a birthday gift for my fiancee.
It is the portrait of an old man looking at a child of around four years old.
The expression on both of their faces
is wonderful. They are reading themselves in each other’s eyes.
The old man embodying the past, the boy embodying the future.
The quizzical look on the child’s face is unbelievably tender.
I had the copy of Fra Filippo Lippi’s The Adoration in the Forest done later, in Florence.
The Egyptian art that I saw in the Louvre also left an indelible impression on me.
In Paris, two phenomena touched me deeply: one was the beautiful art and the other was la misere qui a froid) la misere noire.
I read various statistical works in an attempt to get a better picture of the social conditions.
Paris made an enormous impression on me.
On the one hand such beauty and on the other such terrible squalor.
Actually, I found myself in a terrible state, I’d never seen anything like it before.
whole of human misery … I was completely occupied with dark thoughts about the suffering of humankind, about the gaping black abyss.
Feelings of a grande compassion surged in me. I of.
ten thought of the Buddha, about whom I had read in Schopenhauer.
That people could find Paris amusant baffled me.
I was far too affected by the social tragedy.
I visited the Paris Morgue, went to Les Hailes, spent time in the poor parts of the city.
Paris was either wonderfully beautiful, tasteful and elegant – or it was a pit of squalor.
I found it very difficult to bear. I lived on one franc a day, even though I was already a doctor.
I stayed in a student hotel, Hotel des Balcons, in Rue Casimir Jung commissioned a copy by Leontine Lemee of a detail from the right-hand side of the painting showing the family’s nanny with the four small children.
The copy hung above the marble fireplace in the dining room of the Jung family home at Seestrasse 228 in Kiisnacht. Cf. Foundation C.G.
Jung Kiisnacht (ed.), The House of C. G.Jung, 2009, pp. 70, 74, 75 (there listed erroneously as a copy of a Frans Hals painting).
Delavigne. I would not wish to have missed this time of poverty.
It taught me to appreciate the simple things. I also painted my own pictures at that time.
Landscapes of northern France, small watercolors. And once a large picture of clouds.
Also a few smaller sketches, not that many.
One night I stayed up until four in the morning painting – a landscape painted from memory.
This foreign landscape had made a powerful impression on me – the colors, the atmosphere.
Often I wandered alone around Paris and the surrounding area – Fontainebleau, Versailles, Trianon, and so on. I had to think of Napoleon.
I was totally imbued by French, and also read a lot of French novels.
Later I subscribed to the French newspaper Le Matin for a long time, and acquired a wide vocabulary.
In Paris I spoke like a Frenchman.
I always ate in small, relatively simple bistros and talked with ordinary people – in the street, in shops, or wherever the opportunity
presented itself.
In that way I even more or less mastered the argot.
From Paris I went to England, where I found it difficult to adjust.
At that time my English was still very limited.
I did not attend any lectures there, just visited some hospitals, and spent most of my time in museums and galleries again.
Oxford was the high point of my stay
in England. It was a city that suited me very well.
The thrill I felt upon seeing the colleges for the first time is unforgettable.
And the conversations that went on there! After dinner a silver snuff mull was passed around.
Then came black coffee with cigars and liqueurs, followed by intellectual discussions in the style of the 18th century.
Only men were present, because the discourse was supposed to be exclusively intellectual. ~Carl Jung, Reflections on the Life and Dreams of C.G. Jung, Page23-26
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