The problem of crucifixion is the
beginning of individuation
Personal Encounters with Jung and his work
I was 26 years old when I first went out to Zurich to start analysis with Jung.
It is not difficult to imagine with what expectations, hopes, and, needless to say, projections, I arrived.
I knew that I was going to stay for three months, until Jung had his usual term
break, and I was sure that the great magician, the old wise man, the archetype of the self, and what have you, would transform me from a rather insecure and diffident young man into a fully integrated total personality.
I gradually became more and more disorientated and disappointed when I noticed that absolutely nothing seemed to happen – I did not feel any different from what I had felt when I had set out for Zurich.
So I left after three months with a profound feeling of disillusionment and frustration.
Had it really been worth my while? All the great hopes, all the effort, had been in
vain.
But then a very strange thing happened.
First my friends, then I myself felt that my whole life, my whole outlook, were gradually changing for the better, that I had got a much better grip on reality, a better understanding of relationship – in short that I had become a different person, much more positive and creative than I had ever been.
Only then did I realize how Jung, by an unnoticeable influence, had penetrated right into the depths of my psyche, how in an imperceptible way of creative passivity he had made myself clearer to myself.
Then for the first time I understood what it meant to be in the aura of a deeply integrated person, how the healing radiation of such a person could affect one profoundly without any immediate outward sign.
And then there is another experience which is characteristic of the way Jung worked.
In the winter of 1934 I had gone to one of the by now almost legendary seminars which Jung used to give on Wednesday mornings at what was then the Psychological Club in Zurich.
The seminar had been on the “Interpretation of Visions” which had already run for something like 4 years.
I no longer remember the exact content of that particular seminar, but it μad been one of those days on which Jung had been at his very best and he had communicated a great deal of his unique wisdom and knowledge.
The seminar had been full of exciting new ideas and thoughts.
I had felt deeply touched and stirred by all that had been said.
With me on this morning there had been two close friends; together we left the Clubhouse in the Gemeindestrasse in silence and concentration.
I was the first to break the silence, saying:
“Today he has truly talked about myself and my crucial problems and answered all my unasked questions.”
I shall never forget the almost indignant protest with which first the one then the other friend contradicted me:
“But no, he talked about my problems.” – “Nonsense, it was exactly my questions he answered.”
We broke off and looked at each other, realizing that a man had talked to us out of the centre of his being, and therefore from such a level that he included all our individual personalities and transcended them, that we had been in the presence of and touched by a man of true genius.
I have often remembered my experience of that day and thought about it.
It seems to me to contain a great deal of the secret of Jung’s personality and of a wisdom which far transcended rational formulation.
The possibility of talking to people beyond individual frontiers and barriers, of entering so deeply into the layers of common humanity, is only given to the one who himself lives in immediate relation to the sources of life.
I have often thought of the present which fate has presented to those who were allowed to meet in their own life such a person of genius.
To us today it may be difficult to imagine fully what sacrifices had to be made, what dangers to be met, before that person of genius had achieved such depth and intensity·.
For us who enjoy the fruits of the labours of the great pioneers of depth-psychology, it is easy to forget what it must have meant to a Freud to set out on the road into the problems of his dreams – a road, which Ernest Jones in his great Freud biography calls Freud’s “most heroic deed” – or for a Jung to expose himself so unreservedly to the powers of the archetypal images as he did.
At least we can see and feel something of Jung’s courage through his report in his Memories.
They make it evident what dark nights of the soul, which danger-fraught experiences had to be lived through before the deus abscondz’tus, the hidden god, released his creative realizations.
In a letter of 1936, not published in the selection now available, Jung writes:
“The problem ·of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation, there is the secret meaning of the Christian symbolism, a path of blood and suffering – like any
other step forward on the road of the evolution of human consciousness. Can man stand a further increase of consciousness? … Is it really worth while that man should progress morally and intellectually? Is that gain worth the candle? That’s the question.
I don’t want to force my views on anybody else. But I confess that I submitted to the divine power of this apparently unsurmountable problem and I consciously and intentionally made my life miserable, because I wanted God to be alive and free from the suffering man has put on him by loving his own reason more than God’s secret intentions.
There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all my science. I think that God in his turn has bestowed life upon me and has saved me from petrification … Thus I suffered and was miserable, but it seems that life was never wanting and in the blackest night even, and just there, by the grace of God, I could see a Great Light. Somewhere there seems to be great kindness in the abysmal darkness of the deity … Try to apply seriously what I have told you, not that you might escape suffering – nobody can escape it – but that you may avoid the worst – blz’nd suffering.”
Such an attitude puts a heavy obligation on us who want to be his pupils: the obligation for personal decision.
Thus in my own analysis withJung, about two years along, I dreamt that he had
died.
I was in his house in Kiisnacht, in the ante-chamber of the room where he was lying in state.
I was depressed and dejected, and I paced up and down the room; suddenly my mood changed.
I felt new courage and determination grow in me and I said to a friend who was with me:
“It does not make it better to moan and sigh. Now he has left us, and it is up to us to continue.”
When I told Jung the dream his reaction was simply:
“All right, now you can begin your own work with patients.”
This experience of separation, which everybody experiences in one form or another, is without doubt a challenge to accept one’s own responsibility and find one’s own way.
This step into one’s own individuality means the end of identification with the
great figure of authority; it may even mean that one may have to take a different path. In this connection it is important to remember that today there are left only relatively few people who have encountered Jung personally.
To most people Jung will have become alive through his writings or, maybe, through analytical work with one of his direct or indirect pupils.
In this lies also the chance and the need for new searching.
Such new possibilities are not just of a personal nature, in the sense of a continuous challenge to oneself, but they also confront us with the need to test and query the discoveries and formulations of the great pioneers.
It is truly the essence of great research to create ever new levels of awareness which in their turn become the springboard for future discoveries and the enlargement of the present sphere of consciousness, even though we can as yet hardly discern in what direction any new steps may lead us.
I shall return to this point later on.
In the beginning I spoke of the dangers which a pioneer like Jung exposed himself to when he faced the world of the great archetypal images.
Another side of this travail is the loneliness in which the genius has to live.
When I readJung’s Memories for the first time I was deeply moved and disturbed by the immense loneliness which they revealed.
This loneliness is manifest also in the continuous misunderstandings which the pioneer has to face.
And not only misunderstandings, but reproaches from the side of the collective that feels threatened in its foundations.
One morning I arrived in Jung’s house and found him in a bad temper.
With indignation he told me that he had been made the scapegoat for the breakdown of a patrician Swiss marriage, the partners of which he did not even know.
But was this accusation not perhaps justified in a certain sense?
Could it not have been that Jung’s thoughts about human relationships in their authentic meaning, about the obligation to inner honesty, and about the right to be seen and treated by the partner as a true individual had penetrated the collective, protective wall of this so-called good marriage?
Jung himself felt this loneliness as a heavy burden.
In a letter of November 1960, also unpublished, during the last year of his life,
he wrote in a short and uncharacteristic bout of depression:
“Your letter has reached me at a time which was the tail end of a series of disappointments … I had to understand that I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole … I have failed in my foremost task: to
open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul, and that there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state … ”
Jung’s words express clearly how he experienced and suffered from the incompleteness and faultiness of the world’s condition.
But it is just out of such realizations that the creative spirit helps to shape the character of a new generation.
In what then do I see these great concepts pointing into the future?
I cannot go into a detailed account of the more practical and therapeutic discoveries.
Let me mention only a few fundamental ideas, such as Jung’s typology, so often misunderstood as a schematic pattern of personality, but in reality revealing the dynamic interplay of opposites; or his revolutionary discovery of the psyche as a self-regulating system, based on his description of the creative function of the unconscious; or again his description of the mechanism of projection or of the dialectic relationship of analyst and patient and of the phenomenon of counter-transference;
his strikingly new definition of the symbol with its dynamic and integrative effect as a transformer of energy, emphasising a finalistic point of view as against a purely causal one, or still again his disc·overy of the archetypes of the collective unconscious which opened up completely new vistas into the understanding of psychic processes and for the content of the imagery of religion, alchemy, poetry, and many other subjects.
To these there still has to be added the concept of synchronicity as a profound challenge to the assumption of universal linear causality.
And finally, as the synthesis of all Jung’s ideas, we have to mention his concept of the process of individuation. ~Gerhard Adler, Dynamics of the Self, Page 88-93
