Jung, seeing that catastrophe, the First World War,
coming, was impelled to warn them urgently
INTRODUCTION
Although I believe that Jung himself would not have cared tov publish these juvenilia, they are highly interesting, readable, andvimportant.
They are lectures he gave to his fellow students at BaselvUniversity when he was between twenty-one and twenty-three yearsvof age.
On the 18th of May 1895 he had joined the Basel sectionvof the color-wearing fraternity “Zofingia,” in which it was a traditionvfor the members to give, from time to time, lectures about theirvspecial fields of interest.
The lectures were supposed to meet a highvscientific standard and at the same time to express political andvother opinions in an outspoken manner befitting a closed circlevwhose members felt free of academic and social conventions.
Thevreader has to bear this in mind when reading the often sarcasticvand strong language that the young medical candidate, C. G. Jung, used in expressing his convictions.
It is a great advantage that the lectures Jung gave at the Zofingiavmay now be published (by permission of the Jung family, in whosevpossession they are preserved), because what we had known aboutvthem only from the recollections of Gustav Steiner, a co-membervof the Zofingia, had given rise to misunderstandings.
Steiner commentedvon Memories, Dreams, Reflections, upon its publication after
Jung’s death.’
Jung himself had a double reaction toward his experiences in the Zofingia: his student days were “a good time,” he wrote,2 and a source of friendship and intellectual exchange, but he also said how lonely he really was, because his fellow students failed to understand what he wanted to say. To them he was full of exuberant, aggressive, youthful elan. They had little idea of how much he suffered because, although they were duly impressed by his lectures, they obviously did not really take them as seriously as Jung hoped they would. If one looks back today at what two wars and a general cultural decay have led to, one can better understand the aggressive urgency of his talks.3
Steiner himself states that thevstudents then lived in a purely materialist “sleepy” time which hadvnothing to offer to young people. “We then experienced thevcatastrophe.”v4
Jung, seeing that catastrophe, the First World War,vcoming, was impelled to warn them urgently.
It disappointed himvhow little his companions reacted to it.
As a whole, however, thevZofingia was for Jung a positive experience.
When he joined, itsvBasel section had 120 members, So of whom were active.
Theyvoften met in smaller circles devoted to special interests, which Jung did not join, and, as his friend Albert Oeri tells us, he did not much care for the parties devoted to drinking and dancing.5
Yet, in his paper, Oeri draws a lively, sympathetic picture of his young friend.
He was a cheerful comrade, “always prepared to revolt against the ‘League of Virtue.’ ”
He later discovered that he could dance quite well without having learned to. His student name, incidentally, was Walze (barrel).
Jung was active mainly in the scientific discussions.
In spite ofvbeing an outsider in his views, he dominated and fascinated his
audience, “luring them into speculative areas of thought which tovthe majority of us were an alien wonderland ….
It was wonderful to let oneself be lectured to, as one sat with him in his room.
Hisvlittle dachshund would look at me so earnestly, just as though he
understood every word, and Jung did not fail to tell me how thevsensitive animal would sometimes whimper piteously when occult forces were active.”
Often they sat until late in the night at the pub called “Breo.”
Jung did not like to walk home alone through the Nightingale Wood, so he told his friend such interesting stories 3 How Steiner himself still later took Jung’s polemics as a “pleasure” and an “exercise” of discussion can be read in his article (p. 141, for instance).
One alleged contradiction pointed out by Steiner has been taken over by Henri Ellenberger (The Discovery of the Unconscious, New York, 1970, p. 688), namely, that Jung in a discussion asserted that the theological axiom according to which God can be experienced is wrong, that he himself “never had such an experience.”
Steiner (p. 161) sees in this a contradiction to Jung’s experience of God which he relates in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
What he overlooks is that Jung meant that the axiomatic “good God” of the theologians cannot be experienced.
What we have are experiences that are mediated by or possibly spring from the unconscious and that are often very “strange.”
Steiner and Ellenberger missed the point in this respect.
that he came along with him without noticing it.
When he stayed out until it was already morning, Jung picked some flowers to soften his mother’s anger.
In the Zofingia Jung kept silent in the meetings for the first three semesters, but later took a leading role.
The motto of the Zofingia was Patriae, amicitiae, litteris (“For fatherland, friendship, and literature”).
The fraternity had been founded in 1820/21, more or less simultaneously with the German Burschenschaften, at first in sympathy with the latter but also, almost
at once, in opposition to them, because the Germans wanted to integrate and absorb the Swiss into a pan-Germanic movement.
But from the beginning, the Zofingia stressed its purely Swiss independence. 6
It was the time after the Napoleonic Wars, when the survivors of the pre-Napoleonic era sought everywhere to abolish the republican order Napoleon had instituted.
The German student movement was, at that time, a romantic uprising characterized
by patriotism and liberal ideals, fighting against all shades of absolutism, the prerogatives of certain classes, and (mostly in Switzerland) the rule of the urban aristocracy over the country folk.
Although in a moderate way revolutionary, the Swiss movement firmly upheld the idea of a legal state, with the Swiss army as a means to defend the independence and neutrality of the nation.
However, events brought a split into the fraternity, and the more conservative group collided with the more liberal.
The latter even founded a separate fraternity called “Helvetia” or, in the thirties,
“Neo-Zofingia.”
The split lasted until 1856, when the two groups were reunited as a new Zofingia, the society which Jung joined.
From his approval of the Langenthal episode, a quarrel between liberal and conservative students in which the liberals won, we can see that his feelings were not with the more conservative but with the liberal? tendencies within the reunited fraternity.
For this reunion, however, the Zofingia paid a price: from then on its members
no longer identified with actual party politics but set up the ideal of supporting patriotism, friendship, and education only in a general way, leaving each member to join any party he liked
(except the anarchists or other parties which worked for the overthrow of the Swiss state and its independence).8
Although this saved the unity of the organization, it also led to the perils against which Jung seems to warn in his presidential address, namely that the fraternity was in danger of becoming a peaceful, “sleepy,” young men’s club with no more spirit to fight for realistic goals.
But viewed as a whole, Jung’s relationship to the Zofingia was positive, because
the fraternity helped him step out of his isolation and formulate the ideas churning in him at that stage of his life. ~Carl Jung, Zofingia Lectures, Page xiii-xvi
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