Ann Casement – Carl Jung and the Grail
CHAPTER 13
Jung’s transmutation: Siegried to Parsifal
A first version of this chapter was presented at the 2019 IAAP International Congress held in Vienna, the setting being an important reason for including a fair amount of material on Freud. The chapter is based largely on Jung’s Red Book in its assertion that Jung’s quest for his soul, as he expresses it in that work, is actually the Quest for the Grail.
In the process of writing a chapter for Murray Stein and Thomas Arzt’s Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions, I reread the entirety of Jung’s Red Book and, in so doing, came across the myth of Parsifal embedded in the text.
In The Red Book there are several allusions to that myth, which is the
one associated with Jung’s natal sign of Leo.
“I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 15) is what he sets out knowingly to find though he appears to have come upon it unwittingly as, although there are frequent references to the Parsifal myth, I could find no acknowledgement that this was his myth.
As the present chapter is, to a large extent, based on the contents of The Red Book, I shall begin with my personal experience of the latter leading up to its publication in 2009. Prior to that date, I was already familiar with some of its contents from Aniela Jaffé’s 1979 C. G. Jung: Word and Image, which includes some text and images from it.
I first recall hearing from my friend, Sonu Shamdasani, of his work on The Red Book in the early 2000s, though throughout that time he was bound by confidentiality agreements not to disclose any of its contents.
Finally, in August 2009, Sonu and Maggie Barron hosted a private seminar lasting a few days for a small group of individuals at Cliveden, an elegant mid-nineteenth-century house in the English county of Berkshire.
This private seminar preceded the formal launch of The Red Book: Liber Novus on 7th August 2009 at the Rubin Museum in New York, where the exhibition also included Jung’s Black Books, the precursors of The Red Book.
Before setting out for the New York launch in 2009, I managed to get hold of two copies of the first edition in order to write a review for The Economist that would coincide with the date of its publication.
My editor on the paper was astonished by the high quality of Jung’s artwork and queried whether he had done it all himself.
These paintings show the influence of the indigenous civilisations of Ancient Egypt, India, Mexico, and Tibet, as well as the symbolist artist, Odilon Redon, and the Byzantine frescoes and mosaics in Ravenna.
That unforgettable time with Sonu and members of the Jung family as well as other luminaries such as James Hillman, George Makari, Frank McMillan, and Beverley Zabriskie, spent together in New York for the book’s launch, consisted of eleven days of frenzied activity, particularly
for Sonu, so much so that many of us were concerned for his well-being.
This special event was followed in 2010 by an exhibit of the Red and Black Books at the Library of Congress in Washington, which was attended by the eminent Librarian of Congress, James Billington.
Once again, some of the same people who came to the New York launch
attended these proceedings in Washington, where the Swiss embassy put
on a reception for all of us at the ambassador’s residence in the US capital.
Immediately following the launch in New York, I conducted an interview
with Sonu for The Journal of Analytical Psychology, in the course of which he discussed some of the main features of The Red Book, that Jung had worked on from 1914 to 1930. A key point about the work is that it is not a scientific study but a private cosmology forming the bedrock of Jung’s public work in which he is exploring various questions.
These consist of the impossibility of reconciling Western science with
what science has forsaken; how psychology can differentiate religious
jung’s transmutation experiences from psychosis; and what to do with irrational experiences that are so far from rationality.
“What is prophetic in Jung’s text is the rebirth of the God image and the image of God” (Casement, 2010, p. 36).
As Shamdasani goes on to say in the interview, there is a crisis of language in The Red Book that emerges from the tension between directed and non-directed thinking, with the text oscillating between the two poles.
The literary content of the book was composed in such a way that it should be comparable to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and the key figure of Philemon links to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Goethe’s Faust. Siegfried
I have given the above personal account as a prelude to homing in on the specific theme of this chapter, namely, Jung’s claim that The Red Book
depicts his own transmuting process, which may be seen in his shift from
identifying with the Germanic hero, Siegfried, to the unwitting discovery
of Parsifal as “his” own myth.
This matches with Jung’s theoretical construct of the first and second halves of life—according to which, the former is normally extraverted as it deals with ego development in the form of finding a partner, settling down to home and family, and developing a career, usually accomplished in Jung’s time when an individual had reached their mid to late thirties.
The second half of life, says Jung, is introverted whence the focus is on the inner life as a preparationfor death, which brings to mind Heidegger’s being-unto-death.
The latter assertion is my own because Jung appears unread in Heidegger,
testified to by the fact there are no references to the latter in the General
Index, Volume 20 of the Collected Works, only one to a J. H. Heidegger, a
Swiss theologian.
The following is a distillation of how I understand Heidegger’s
being-unto-death, his version of preparedness for death, which
is expressed in the first person singular.
When I take on board the possibility of my own not being, my own not being-able-to-Be is brought into proper view.
Hence my awareness of my own death as an omnipresent possibility discloses the authentic self—a self that is mine opposed to a theyself.
The possibility of my not existing encompasses the whole of y existence and my awareness of that possibility illuminates me, qua Dasein, in my totality.
To return to The Red Book, there are so many literary and esoteric allusions
running through the text and the footnotes in it, which entailed several forays into the work before I was made aware of the theme of Parsifal running through much of the book.
These are preceded earlier in the work by Jung’s significant dream about Siegfried, which he refers to in the following way: “… a mighty dream vision rose from the depths” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 160).
This dream has been much analysed over the years by psychoanalysts, including yours truly.
I was with a youth in high mountains.
It was before day-break, the Eastern sky was already light. Then Siegfried’s horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound.
We knew that our mortal enemy was coming.
We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him.
Then we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of
the bones of the dead. He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding.
As he came around the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time and he fell slain.
Thereupon I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down.
But after this I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself, if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. (1963, p. 173)
Following this dream/vision, Jung seemed to follow a natural process of filling the void left by the death of Siegfried, “the blond and blue-eyed
German hero” who “had everything in himself that I treasured as the
greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride”
(Shamdasani, 2009, p. 163), and who is sometimes thought of as a storm
trooper.
Jung gives the following reason for this murder: “I wanted to go on living with a new God” (ibid.), and the rain is “… the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth … it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God” (ibid., p. 164).
Before proceeding further with The Red Book, it is necessary to retrace our steps and look at what the psychological astrologer and Jungian jung’s transmutation analyst, Liz Greene, says about the myth attached to Jung’s natal sign.
My own interest in astrology was piqued through making her acquaintance, and I was particularly drawn to the way she linked mythology to each sign of the Zodiac, which in Jung’s case lies in the sign of Leo, the sign that denotes the hero’s quest for his spiritual father.
The lion is a fiery animal and those born under this sign will have to battle strong instinctual urges in order to begin to individuate as Jung expresses it.
Liz Greene links the legend of Parsifal to the sign of Leo with its overarching theme of redemption, on the face of it a much-lauded quality but one that also has a shadow component that will be explored later in this chapter.
In the legend of Parsifal, it is the wounded father that needs redeeming,
a theme that erupted in and finally destroyed Jung’s relationship with
Freud.
At the start, Parsifal is fatherless, which underlines the lack of a father-principle “although there may be a physical father present” as there was in Jung’s life (Greene, 1984, p. 206).
In order to remind ourselves of the story of Parsifal, we will now turn to the version of the legend that Wagner chose to use for his last great oeuvre.
This is well set out in the late Bryan Magee’s Wagner and Philosophy, a book highly recommended to those who love both Wagner and philosophy as Magee had a profound grasp of both, a combination that is rare indeed. Wagner’s late musical dramas owe a huge debt (as he himself acknowledged) to Schopenhauer, with Wagner’s Parsifal representing the greatest influence of that philosopher, in particular the theme of redemption through compassion.
Wagner, of course, also composed and wrote the libretto of Siegfried, the third opera of his great opus The Ring. It is not entirely fanciful to think of the later works by this incomparable composer as Schopenhauer set to music.
In many ways, the character of Siegfried shares quite a bit in common with Parsifal, for example, both are bumbling youths when we first encounter them, although Parsifal eventually supersedes the fate of Siegfried.
How much of that might have been in Jung’s mind when he was composing his Red Book is unknown so let us now remind ourselves of the story of Parsifal as it appears in Magee’s book.
The knights of the holy grail are the guardians of the most numinous
objects on the face of the earth.
These are the grail itself, which is the chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, and the spear that pierced his side as he hung on the cross.
This treasure is guarded by them in Montsalvat, their redoubt in the mountains of northern Spain, the paths to which can never be found by sinners.
Here their sublime ritual is a regular re-enactment of the Last Supper in which they themselves drink from the grail.
Their fitness for their office requires them to remain pure and chaste.
Theirs is an all-male community, except for a dowdy and bedraggled woman called Kundry, a solitary, humble servitor who lives hermit-like in their domain, though occasionally she disappears from the scene for long periods.
At some time in the past a knight called Klingsor has aspired to join the order but been prevented from doing so by his inability to master his
sexual desires.
In a drastic attempt to kill the lust in himself he castrated himself.
This horrendous act, far from giving him entrance to the order, made the order view him with revulsion, and turned him into a permanent outcast from it. His self-mutilation gave him access to magic powers, however, and he set out to use these to gain possession of the spear and the grail.
He built a castle in the same mountain range as Montsalvat, and—understanding as he did the disabling power of sexual desire, but being now immune to it himself—drew round him a subject community of gorgeous women with the task of seducing knights of the grail when they sallied forth from Montsalvat.
There were plenty of knights who succumbed; and from the moment they did so Klingsor had them in his power.
Faced with this mortal threat to the order, its king, Amfortas, set out one day armed with the holy spear itself to destroy Klingsor.
But on the way he encountered a fearsomely beautiful woman who seduced him from this aim—only in passing, as he thought.
Letting go of the spear to make love to her, he discovered too late that he had fallen into a trap set by Klingsor.
The hidden magician, watching the whole scene, rushed in, seized the spear, plunged it into Amfortas’s side, and made off with it.
So Klingsor had got the spear, and it remained only for him to get possession of the grail.
Amfortas, his life suspended by a thread, managed to get back to
Montsalvat, overwhelmed by mortification and guilt, and in physical
agony from his wound.
The wound never healed and never ceased to agonise, and yet the death for which Amfortas now longed as the only release from intolerable shame never came.
He found himself with a mortal wound that was permanent, and he lived on, hanging between life and jung’s transmutation death.
As king of the order he had no choice but to go on leading the regular enactments of the Last Supper—he, the only sinner in the order,
conducting the service.
He did this under the fiercest protest on account of his sense of unfitness, and had to be dragged to his place by the knights, physically crippled by his wound and emotionally crippled by guilt.
The remorse that ate into his soul might be appeased partially if the spear could be returned to Montsalvat, and at least he would be able to die in peace.
Year after year, knight after knight rode out to recover the spear and restore the situation; but each of them succumbed to one of Klingsor’s temptresses, and none of them ever returned.
The order went into a
decline which, if not halted, was bound to end in its demise.
A prophecy
emanating from the grail warned the order that it would be salvaged only
by a pure fool whose understanding of the situation was nothing to do
with cleverness but had been arrived at through compassion.
This is the background to the moment when a pure fool, killing birds
for fun, comes chasing along one of the paths into the knights’ domain.
As an innocent at large he unknowingly finds ways that are hidden from
sinners.
This is Parsifal, an abnormally simple and ignorant young man.
His father, a knight, was killed in battle before he was born, and his
mother, fearful of a similar fate for him, brought him up in ignorance
of his father, and of arms in general, and of the dangerous world.
But one day he saw a group of men in glittering array ride past on beautiful
creatures that he did not even know to be horses. Entranced, he ran after
them, but could not run as fast as the horses, and found himself in the
end lost and far from home.
From then on he wandered aimlessly, living from moment to moment, defending himself with a simple bow against robbers, wild beasts, and giants.
His mother, to whom he never returned, died of grief at his loss; but he did not know this, and gave no special thought to her.
When he blunders into Montsalvat he has no idea where he has come from; and he is unable to tell questioners what his name is, or who his father was.
The wisest of the knights, Gurnemanz, at once seizes on the hope that this person is the prophesied saviour, and introduces him as a spectator to the order’s ritual and lets him see Amfortas’s agony.
But Parsifal has no more understanding of any of this, and no more compassion for Amfortas, than he has shown towards his mother.
Seeing this, Gurnemanz gives up hope—Parsifal is just a fool, evidently,
nothing more. So Gurnemanz turns him out of Montsalvat altogether.
From there Parsifal blunders into Klingsor’s domain.
There his complete ignorance and innocence make him immune to the seductions of the women; and he routs Klingsor’s knights in the same way as he has routed robbers, wild beasts, and giants.
To bring him to heel, Klingsor confronts him with his supreme, hitherto irresistible temptress, the very same who had seduced Amfortas.
With her characteristic insight she arouses Parsifal’s sexuality for the first time in his life by evoking his relationship with his mother.
Partly because of this he experiences with her the onslaught of sexual desire in all its ferocity—and realises what had happened to Amfortas.
Ravaged by desire at its most terrible and imperious he does not flee from it, despite his terror, but lives it through without evasion, and finally succeeds in overcoming it.
The experience constitutes a breakthrough for him in understanding and insight.
Through it he achieves compassionate empathy not only with Amfortas
but with suffering humankind in general, eternally stretched out on its
rack of unsatisfiable willing.
He understands its need for redemption, and also what it means to be a redeemer who takes on himself the burden of suffering humanity—and therefore the significance of the re-enactment of the Last Supper which he had witnessed so uncomprehendingly at Montsalvat.
All becomes clear to him.
But, alas, although he is now able to destroy Klingsor’s castle and recover the spear, the temptress has left her curse on him nevertheless: after his experiences with her he is no longer the innocent he had been before, and when he leaves the ruins of Klingsor’s castle he can no longer find the path back to Montsalvat—at least not until after many years of wandering and searching, years during which the order of the grail declines almost to extinction.
But he does find it eventually. He also finds himself remembered, and recognised, though recognised for what he truly is.
He cures the wound of Amfortas by touching it with the point of the spear that caused it, and takes over from a now gratefully released Amfortas the leadership of the order, obviously to restore and surpass its former glories.
The arch temptress too achieves redemption in this final scene.
For it turns out that she and Kundry are one and the same person.
Through hundreds of years she has been living through a succession of lives in search of atonement for the ultimate sin, the ultimate lack of compassion: she had laughed and mocked at Christ as he was being flogged towards his own crucifixion.
At different times in her existence she is both of the jung’s transmutation
faces of the female archetype, on the one hand woman as nurturer and
carer, on the other hand woman as temptress and destroyer.
When she had been in Montsalvat she had been seeking expiation and redemption as an undemanding, self-sacrificing, barely noticed minister to the needs of others; but during her unaccountable absences she had been in search of self-fulfilment through sexual love, as the ultimately beautiful voluptuary and lover.
Having been repudiated in the second of these embodiments by Parsifal it is left to her only to serve him, and through doing so with no longer any possibility of self-gratification she finally reaches her redemption and attains release from the chain of being.
All the characters except Parsifal have been looking for fulfilment or redemption in the wrong place, and therefore would never have found it except through him.
Kundry has sought it not through loving but through being loved, or through being needed.
Klingsor has aspired to it through power. Amfortas has grasped for it in death.
The knights of the order have been hoping to achieve it by belonging to a society whose membership and vitality are in fact declining, and whose rituals, conducted by someone unworthy to do so, are a mockery.
Only Parsifal understands that redemption is not to be found through observances and not through any form of self-gratification either, but through its opposite, namely denial of the will in all its forms:
if through love, then utterly one-way love; if through power, then mastery over oneself, not mastery over others; if in death, then in death as a fulfilment of life, not as an escape from it; if in ritual, then in enactments dedicated wholly to something outside and beyond the participants, through self-effacement in the transcendental, and hence through self-transcendence in the most literal sense.
So the man who brings redemption to most of the other characters, and to the order of knights, himself finds redemption in the process. (Magee, 2000, pp. 265–269)
The Red Book
The themes spelt out in this account appear in The Red Book with the figure of Christ recurring throughout, including several references to the fifteenth-century religious thinker, Thomas à Kempis’s book The Imitation
of Christ: “There is no one so perfect and holy that he never meets temptation; we cannot escape it altogether” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 336).
Among several others, there are further allusions to Christ (see pages 137, 331, 343, 356, 357).
The divine child symbolised by the pure, innocent fool, Parsifal, is another key motif that runs through The Red Book (pages 118, 204, 296).
The innocence and the potential of the child are both personified by Parsifal.
On pages 363–364, there is specific mention of Parsifal.
At first, Jung finds himself in a magnificent garden and it occurs to him this is Klingsor’s magical garden.
It seems he is in a theatre and that the characters of Amfortas and Kundry are part of the play.
Klingsor is also there and Jung says:
“How closely Klingsor resembles me! What a repulsive play! But look, Parsifal enters from the left. How strange, he also looks like me” (Shamdsani, 2009, pp. 363–364).
The scene changes: It appears that the audience, in this case me, joins in during the last act.
One must kneel down as the Good Friday service begins: Parsifal enters—slowly, his head covered with a black helmet.
The lionskin of Hercules adorns his shoulders and he holds the club in his hand, he is also wearing modern black trousers in honor of the church holiday.
I bristle and stretch out my hand avertingly, but the play goes on.
Parsifal takes off his helmet.
Yet there is no Gurnemanz to atone for and consecrate him.
Kundry stands in the distance, covering her head and laughing.
The audience is enraptured and recognises itself in Parsifal.
He is I. I take off my armor layered with history and my chimerical
decoration and go to the spring wearing a white penitent’s shirt … I walk out of the scene and approach myself—I who am still kneeling down in prayer as the audience. I rise and become one with myself. (Ibid.)
The dyad of Elijah/Salome in The Red Book may be linked to Klingsor/
Kundry; the male part, Elijah, Jung equates with his notion of the self, the
central archetype that is individual to the person unlike the other archetypes, that are universal.
The female part of the dyad, Kundry/Salome, was instrumental in Jung’s development of the notion of anima in its most ambiguous dual aspect as seducer/destroyer and loving/nurturing mother.
Jung’s fear of Salome’s designs on his head is of course taken from the biblical story wherein she is the cause of John the Baptist’s beheading, the latter figure being the herald of a new God just as Jungis seeking one in The Red Book. Furthermore, a severed head is another way of talking about castration which, in turn, links back to Klingsor’s castration.
The figure of the Magician has a long chapter devoted to it in The Red Book and is represented by Philemon, a figure first encountered in antiquity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where he and his wife, Baucis, represent the poor ageing couple who welcome into their home the gods, Jupiter and Mercury (Zeus and Hermes in Greek mythology).
Philemon, who incorporates aspects of Gurnemanz and a wise magician, is the prototype for the mana personality that Jung developed in his exoteric writing in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.
The attainment of this stage of consciousness comes about through the subjection of the mana (from the Oceanic term meaning magical knowledge and power) of the anima daemonic complex.
Through this process it is possible for ego to disengage from entanglements with the collective unconscious.
The figure of Philemon in The Red Book is a benign version of the evil magician Klingsor, and represents the archetypal Wise Old Man accompanying Jung as a guide on his quest (see pages 395, 397).
Jung writes of this figure in Psychological Types as follows:
The magician has preserved in himself a trace of primordial paganism, he possesses a nature that is still unaffected by the Christian splitting, which means he has access to the unconscious, which is still pagan, where the opposites still lie in their original naīve state, beyond all sinfulness, but, if assimilated into conscious life, produces evil and good with the same primordial and consequently daimonic force (Part of that power which would/ Ever work evil yet engenders good).… he is a destroyer as well as
savior.
The figure is therefore pre-eminently suited to become the symbol carrier for an attempt at unification. (1971, p. 188)
As may be deduced from this long quotation, for Jung it is the ultimate goal of unifying opposites that leads to redemption, a significant theme we shall return to at the end of this chapter.
In the meantime, let us press on with identifying other allusions to the Parsifal legend in The Red Book. A giant Jung encounters is called Izdubar, a character from the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic who has been wounded by the “poison” of science—an allusion Jung lifts from Nietzsche where in The Gay Science, Nietzsche argues that thinking arose from several impulses that had the effect of poison—to doubt being one.
Izdubar says: “No stronger being has ever cut me down, no monster has ever resisted my strength. But your poison … has lamed me to the marrow” (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 279).
Izdubar’s wound and Jung’s pity for him resonates with the feelings Parsifal has for Amfortas’s wound.
Good Friday appears in the play from The Red Book previously mentioned
and is a direct link to the Good Friday ritual in the Parsifal legend.
Jung goes on to say:
“This is the Good Friday when we complete the Christ in us and we descend to Hell ourselves … Good Friday on which we moan and cry to will the completion of Christ” (ibid., p. 370).
The Way of the Cross has its own section in The Red Book and begins with the words: “I saw the black serpent, as it wound itself upward around the
cross” (ibid., p. 189).
The serpent represents the animal soul and appears frequently in the book; this section is also dedicated to the Crucifixion.
The Last Supper appears in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the Parsifal legend,
and The Red Book (ibid., p. 390).
Finally, the magical garden in The Red Book has links to Klingsor’s magical garden and also to the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane (ibid., pp. 174, 363, 412, 552), thereby connecting the themes of humankind’s fall to that of its redemption.
The Red Book ends abruptly when Jung abandoned it to focus on his studies on alchemy—interest in alchemy and the quest for the Holy Grail both have their beginnings in the twelfth century.
Redemption of the father
As a final link to the legend of Parsifal, the goal that is being quested for in The Red Book is what Jung calls individuation, which he views as fulfilment and redemption.
In both cases, the theme of redemption was inspired by Schopenhauer, whose concatenation of Platonic and Kantian ideas with the Upanishads was a profound influence in this way and others on Wagner and Jung.
Self-renunciation as expressed by Schopenhauer as “… unselfinterested love toward others” is the key to redemption, a notion from Schopenhauer which in turn is adopted by jung’s transmutation 183
Wagner and Jung. According to Schopenhauer “All love is compassion”
(1819, pp. 434–435).
Jung shares with Parsifal the early experience of the lack of a father,
although in Jung’s case father was physically present but absent psychologically and intellectually, leaving Jung dissatisfied with their relationship and with a lack of the father principle in his life.
Jung came to feel his father was stuck in outworn tradition, taking God as prescribed by the Bible and from the teachings of his own forefathers.
When Jung was eighteen years old he had many discussions with his father, when he would try to explain his own feelings about an “immediate living
God … omnipotent and free, above his Bible and his Church” (Jung, 1959a, p. 15).
His father’s response was: “Oh, nonsense, you always want to think. One ought not to think, but believe” (ibid., p. 53).
As already stated in the lengthy chapter on Freud earlier in the book, the resulting father complex carried over into Jung’s interaction with the
creator of psychoanalysis in whom he thought he had found the ideal
father figure, as may be readily seen in the following extract from the
Freud/Jung correspondence: “… let me enjoy your friendship not as one
between equals but as that of father and son.
This distance appears to me fitting and natural” (McGuire, 1974, p. 122).
This is just one example of the idealised transference Jung had onto Freud in their early interaction and, like all such idealisations, it inevitably flipped over into its opposite when Jung berated Freud for patronising him and his other followers.
Before that final denouement, one sees evidence of Jung trying to redeem
Freud from what he views as the error of his ways over psychosexuality,
Freud’s innovative marriage of Psyche and Eros.
From Jung’s own words it is clear to see that he never worked through his bitter feelings towards Freud, exemplified by the following quotations from the late works Answer to Job and Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
With his touchiness and suspiciousness the mere possibility of doubt was enough to infuriate him and induce that peculiar doublefaced behaviour of which he had already given proof in the Garden of Eden, when he pointed out the tree to the First Parents and at the same time forbade them to eat of it.
In this way he precipitated the Fall, which he apparently never intended. (1958b, p. 375)
Freud himself had a neurosis … Apparently neither Freud nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his own neurosis. (1963, p. 162)
The hubris of trying to redeem the father needs to be tempered by humility
and compassion, as seen in Parsifal.
Attempts to redeem the father are not the same as constructive criticism, for example, Wolfgang Giegerich’s elucidating critiques of Jung’s writings.
That is a completely different enterprise to delusional notions of redeeming the founding fathers of psychoanalysis from the error of their ways.
Behind that kind of enterprise one may speculate that there are unresolved father complexes—and who is ever free from those?
The most one can do is to have as much awareness of them as possible so they are not acted-out in futile attempts to redeem the external father.
Addendum
Michael Fordham, the eminent English psychoanalyst, has written an account of his last meeting with Jung shortly before the latter’s death in 1961. Jung had written to an English colleague saying he had failed in his mission and was misunderstood and misrepresented.
Fordham visited him in an effort to ease Jung’s distress and described the meeting as follows:
When I came to see him I did not touch on these matters but spoke superficially. If I had not done that I would have had to convey my thought that it was the delusion of being a world savior that made him feel a failure. (1993, p. 120)
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