I know there are people who, even during
their lifetime, live in their own biography and act as if they
were already in a book.
“I Am on My Road and
I Carry My Burden”
I am afraid that my biography, or what occurs to me as such, is unlike other biographies in many regards.
Without wishing to pass value judgments, it is quite impossible for me to remember all the myriad personal details, and afterward to overvalue them so that people even tell them over again in all seriousness.
I know there are people who, even during their lifetime, live in their own biography and act as if they were already in a book.
For me life has been something that had to be lived and not talked about.
Besides, my interest has always been held by little but meaningful things that I
could not speak about anyway, not at least before I had carried them around with me until the time was ripe to speak of them.
Furthermore, I was so consistently not understood that I lost the desire to remember “meaningful conversations” at all.
So help me, even Goethe struck me as a pompous turkey when I read Eckermann’s Conversations!
I am what I am-an ungrateful autobiographer!
These words of C. G. Jung at age eighty-three, addressed to a correspondent in the United States, characterize the problems faced by the biographer of this “ungrateful autobiographer.”
This difficulty is not alleviated by the fact that Jung was not at all the totally inner-directed man he described himself (albeit with good reason) to be.
He did not live in reclusive
retirement from the world, nor shun the company of men.
Rather, his life-one rich in adventures both inner and outer, the life of neurologist and psychotherapist, writer and lecturer, and not least, world traveler-gained depth and density, as well as vitality and color, from meeting with people of all levels of society.
Still, no one who had a direct and more than passing acquaintance with C. G. Jung needed to wait for the actual written appearance of his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, to be convinced of the validity of what was said in his letter.
There is no question about it: the leading role in this life was played not by demonstrable external dates and events, but by that which normally escapes careful observation: inner, subjective experience, which can be communicated only to a
very limited extent.
This is one reason why Jung opposed any biographical or autobiographical presentation during his lifetime, yielding only reluctantly to the unrelenting urgings of his friends and students.
Their persuasion succeeded. But was his secret revealed?
A first attempt was made by those students who wished to learn in their teacher’s own words how he had arrived at the experience and exploration of the unconscious.
The answer took the form of a seminar Jung gave, in English, in Zurich from March to July 192 5, lengthy excerpts from which appeared in the later autobiography.
But the impetus for Memories, Dreams, Reflections came from Kurt Wolff, the former Leipzig publisher living at the time in New York, while he was
attending a session of the Eranos conference, of which Jung was a cofounder and long-time collaborator, at Ascona in 1956. Jung’s personal assistant, Aniela Jaffe, eventually saw to the copying and editing of that work, which is indispensable
for an intimate knowledge of analytical psychology.
The problems I have mentioned naturally arose even as these Memories were being recorded.
As Aniela Jaffe reports,
“I often asked Jung for specific data on outward happenings, but I asked in v~in. Only the spiritual essence of his life’s experience remained in his memory, and this alone seemed to him worth the effort of telling.”
And as Jung had just begun partly to dictate autobiographical material for transcription and partly to remain reticent, he wrote a friend of his student days, Gustav Steiner, of the “impossibility of self-portrayal,” because self-deceptions and
ulterior motives constantly put in doubt the desired, albeit unattainable, objectivity.
Here, too, the letter-writer had to maintain a fact that was decisive and therefore fateful for him, namely that in his life all the “outer” aspects [have been] accidental.
Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value.
As a result, all memory of outer events has faded, and perhaps these “outer” experiences were never so very essential anyhow, or were so only in that they coincided with phases of my inner development ….
But how is it that memories of”external phenomena” have for the most part vanished? Jung supposed that he had apparently “never really been with it,” although he had taken part in the events of his time “with all my energies.”
He could also refer to his psychology, and in particular his notions of psychological
types, in which this particular tendency of the psyche is called “introversion” (“turning within”) and explained accordingly.
In contrast with the extravert, the introvert’s interests, in accordance with this tendency, are essentially concentrated upon the processes and contents of the inner life.
Hence in the end he also arrives at a different evaluation of what he encounters in the course of his life, what he has done and experienced.
Both biographer and reader would thus do well to make clear in their own minds,
at least to begin with, which of these two attitude types are meaningful for them (setting other typological factors aside for the time being), if they wish to gain entry into the secret work of C. G. Jung.
In fact, to understand C. G. Jung means to be concerned not with the individual and personal alone, nor merely with the individual unconscious, to which Sigmund Freud first helped open up the way.
In Jung, as in no other psychologist of his time, the superindividual was paramount.
A decisive role was played by the transpersonal, not only as a biologically and
instinctually grounded driving force, but as an “archetype,” a physical, mental, and spiritual motive power that points beyond man precisely by engaging him in a lifelong process of maturation.
This is “individuation,” the path to full humanness, which is the central theme of Jungian psychology.
With this we enter a wider space-in the strict sense in which Heraclitus, the Dark One of Ephesus, understood it two and a half millennia ago: “You cannot discover the bounds of the soul, even if you have walked off every step-so deep is its meaning (logos),” a statement that has lately been confirmed in multiple ways by modern depth psychology.
This is not an arbitrary theme.
Academic discussion is not enough; rather it always involves the questioner himself.
It involves the whence and whither, the why and wherefore of human existence in general.
It concerns the future and the concrete possibilities for self-realization.
With this, dimensions of reality come into view that point beyond the realm of
goals and things to the unconditioned-hence also Heraclitus’ emphasis on the unboundedness of the human soul.
But when it comes to the person who seems to be at home beyond things, this couplet from Goethe also needs to be taken seriously:
If thou wouldst into the infinite stride, Explore the finite on every side.
Thus the various facets of a biography include place and time, environment and contemporaries, interests and goals, and the problems, fears, and longings of an entire century and of an era-in the end, to explore “on every side” means to inquire into the history and the concrete circumstances of a person’s life.
This in itself is already difficult, for it is hard to shut out the tangle of voices that have expressed themselves with considerable conviction, some for and some against, on the subject ofC. G. Jung.
On one hand, the circle of students and “adherents” grows steadily, ever since the fruitfulness of the influences and stimuli arising from Jungian psychology became clear.
These extend to the formulation of natural and physical scientific and parapsychological questions, as well as religious and wider intellectual ones.
On the other hand, reservations and prejudices against Jung have been great from the beginning.
His first professional mentor, Eugen Bleuler, was sometimes skeptical about his young coworker, although he never doubted his outstanding talent.
In his Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913), Karl Jaspers expressed rejection in harsher terms.
Sigmund Freud, who had chosen his nineteen-years-younger colleague as his “crown prince,” attested shortly after their breakup to Jung’s alarming “disregard for scientific logic.”
Since that time Jung’s style has been reputed to be difficult and confused-an overgeneralization indeed.
Some would see in him an “obscure” mystic, an eccentric esoteric, while failing to make clear what they understand, or misunderstand, by “mysticism” and “esoterism.”
Others do not hesitate to malign an analyst whom they find disagreeable.
Prominent contemporaries, too, were not always very particular, even when it came to accusations involving the catchwords “racism,” “anti-Semitism,” or even “Nazism.”
Ernst Bloch, for example, managed to reduce Jung to a “fascistic, frothy psychoanalyst.”
Yet competent critics of the caliber of Viktor von Weizsacker had to acknowledge that “Jung has done an extraordinary good for psychotherapy, in that he has humanized it and freed it from its psychoanalytical and scientific arrogance.
Through him it has become clear what is really involved in the crisis of culture.”
As far as this criticism of Jung is concerned, it is not hard to concur with Marie-Louise von Franz:
“The name Jung seldom leaves people cold; when one mentions him, one almost always runs into emotionally loaded rejection or enthusiasm, and only rarely objective judgment. But on closer inspection this generally turns out to be that god or demon, the unconscious, whose existence many modern people do not want to admit, and this is why they often raise the most niggling objections against analytical psychology, without realizing that they do so out of fear.
Hence Jung’s work lies as a stumbling-block in the midst of contemporary intellectual production.”
The creator of this work was intimately bound up in it, precisely because it presents the results of experiences that passed through the person of Jung himself-personare means literally “to sound through.”
Therefore a few preliminary remarks about his physical appearance and the effect he had on his contemporaries are in order.
Count Hermann Keyserling, the philosophical writer and founder of the Darmstadt “School of Wisdom” -where Jung often lectured in the twenties, though he did not identify himself with its intentions-was struck by a “mixture of archaic and modern” in the analyst, a “peculiar roughness, coupled with a very great diligence and flair.”
This “paradoxically affecting frame of mind … found a singularly faithful embodiment in his physical presence.
Jung’s body was that of a bear, lumbering and strong and agile all at once, without
gracefulness; his movements matched his oddly unkempt, even uncouth style; but atop this shapeless mass was set a head with one of the finest noses I had ever seen, and the small eyes had an expression that was not only sharp but refined.”
The Berlin neurologist and psychiatrist J. H. Schultz, the originator of Autogenic training, vividly recalled Jung’s “gigantic stature” when he met him as early as 1 900 or so, and later:
“This heavyset, powerful, broad-shouldered man with his immense head, his deep-set brown eyes, now pensive, now flashing, now suspiciously watchful behind keen spectacles, his high Olympian forehead and powerful mouth, radiates mentally, spiritually, and bodily-if we must use these dangerous terms-an unbounded primitivity, in which robust rusticality, childlike wisdom, and visionary fanaticism are all mixed together. A unique personality!”
To the description of Jung’s physical and bodily appearance let us add a word about his psychic disposition.
Even though the fundamental essence of a person cannot be discerned by means of comparisons or typological classifications, characteristics of this kind can nevertheless help to throw a profile into sharper relief.
Jung himself contributed to laying the groundwork for such an effort; both by distinguishing between introverted and extraverted personality types in his
system of typology, and by describing the personality that forms part of the concrete life as “Number 1,” and the one lying more in the background as “Number 2.”
But more of this later.
Another distinction is also possible, depending on the predominance of either the thinking or the feeling function, of sensation or intuition.
Key experiences of various kinds led him to combine the opposition and the interplay of psychic factors, full of tension yet pointing toward a harmonious completion, into a conceptual scheme that can also be applied to the psychologist himself.
In Jung’s case, the functions of intuition and thinking played a determining role.
By his own admission Jung classed himself primarily as an introverted thinking type.
In an interview with the North American psychologist Richard I. Evans, he stressed the role of intuition, for here the subject was the possibility of spontaneous inspiration:
Intuition provides us with perception and orientation in situations where sense, understanding, and feeling are completely useless to us ….
This is an enormously important function if you live in more primitive circumstances or are faced with vital decisions that you cannot master with
learned rules or logic.
It is obvious how important it is for a psychotherapist not only to grasp human situations, such as those of the unconscious life, at a glance in this intuitive way, but then also to be able to elucidate them rationally and raise them to consciousness.
This double functioning of though and intuition in Jung was also confirmed graphologically.
In the handwriting studies that she executed on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, the graphologist Gertraud Gilli did refer to a “predominantly
systematic mode of thinking, whose direction is dictated by logic and a gift for synthesis.”
However, she said, the essential features of Jung’s psychological type can only be grasped “if we consider also his auxiliary function. His thinking is deeply suffused
with intuition, and hence is in a real sense creative.”
Those who were able to observe the subject of this description at closer range, such as his pupil and former analysand Gustav Richard Heyer, could say more precisely how this intuition worked.
Heyer likened his teacher’s psychtc style to that of a medium; at any rate he attested to a “power of perception that could often be called mediumistic” in him.
Impressed by the accuracy of Jung’s dream interpretations, Heyer wrote: “What appears after such interpretations to be a logically arrived-at certainty (and which he readily offered as ‘substantiation’ in such cases) was at bottom frequently the
result of such a highly intuitive inspiration that one cannot help calling it ‘mediumistic’.”
Many of the reservations against this psychic researcher may rest in no small part on this charisma of his.
Such things are held to be incredible or even sinister.
Undoubtedly, intuition that extends beyond the normal level does give rise to both admiration and mistrust.
But Jung did not allow himself to be particularly influenced by either of these reactions.
With characteristic matter-offactness he once noted:
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble …. I am on my road and I carry my burden just as well as I can do …. There is no difficulty in my life that is not entirely myself. Nobody shall carry me as long as I can walk on my own feet. ~Gerhard Wehr, Jung: A Biography, Page 1-8
