Suzanne Gieser, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process
In 1936 and 1937, Jung delivered consecutive seminars in Bailey Island, Maine (see figure 1), and in New York City.
The seminars ran for a total of eleven days, six days on Bailey Island and five days in New York. Jung’s lecture series was titled “Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process.”
The dreams presented were those of physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958).
Jung went into far greater detail concerning the personal aspects of Pauli’s dreams than anywhere else in his published work.
Central to these seminars was showing how the mandala as an expression of the archetype of wholeness spontaneously emerged in the psyche of a modern man, and how this imagery reflects the healing process.
Jung defines archetypes as innate to man, having an invariable core of meaning that is “filled out” with experiential material conditioned by culture and environment.
Therefore it was important to him to provide evidence for this hypothesis by holding up examples from different cultures and epochs, especially from the sphere of religious symbolism.
The themes that Jung chooses to pick up in these seminars are all related to his quest to develop and expound his theories of the psyche.
In the lectures, Jung touches on a wide range of themes.
He presents his theory of dreams; mental illness; the individuation process; regression; the principles of psychotherapeutic treatment; masculine psychology and the importance of the anima, shadow, and persona; psychological types; and psychic energy.
He comments on the political currents of the time such as Nazism, communism, fascism, and mass psychology.
He reflects on modern physics, causality, and the nature of reality.
From the religious sphere, he chooses to illustrate his theories with examples from the Mithraic mysteries, Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, The I Ching, Kundalini Yoga, and ancient Egyptian concepts of body and soul.
From the Christian heritage, he focuses primarily on Catholicism and the
symbolism of the Mass and the Trinity and also on the content of the newly discovered noncanonical gospels and Gnostic ideas.
He also mentions the Dreamtime concept of Aboriginal Australians and their beliefs in healing objects, the Apollonian and Dionysian cults of ancient Greece, Nordic mythology, Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, and the Khidr in the Koran.
From the world of literature, he refers to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Goethe’s Faust, and Meyrink’s The Golem.
He also discusses the Exercitia of Ignatius Loyola and the visions of Zosimos.
The connections to Jung’s further work on these topics is provided in the notes.
Figure 1. Jung at the Bailey Island seminars.
In summary, we see here many of the budding themes that germinated during the years 1937–57 in the ongoing development of Jung’s psychology of religion.
From his initial studies in mythology and religion from 1912 onward, in the early 1930s, Jung drew his comparison principally from Eastern esoteric practices, such as Kundalini Yoga and Daoism.
After this, his focus shifted to the Western tradition, principally medieval alchemy and Christian symbolism.
These themes were then deepened and further explored in the 1940s and 1950s.
WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT THESE SEMINARS?
Most of Jung’s preserved texts and seminars in English have been either translated from German, or, when they were given in English, professionally transcribed and thereafter edited.1
Moreover the translations of Jung’s written works into English have gone through many revisions and “rewritings.”2
As a result, today’s reader has been deprived of a valuable heritage, the fascinating
evidence of the author’s creative process. These seminars comprise Jung’s most extensive oral presentations in spoken English in front of an American audience.
They were only very lightly edited, in order to, as stated in the introduction to the seminars by the Notes Committee, “keep the talks as nearly as possible as Dr. Jung delivered them.”
The Notes Committee consisted of three pioneering women doctors and Jungian analysts who lived in the United States: Kristine Mann, Eleanor Bertine, and Esther
Harding.
Here in this almost verbatim transcript is a chance to “listen in” to the way in which
Jung spoke in English.
Here also is textual evidence of Jung’s intuitive, associative way of thinking, a style that would lead him to meander in many different directions, so much so that he
was unable to keep to his original plan of covering the complete dream material—the eighty-one unconscious visions and dreams that he had selected to illustrate Pauli’s individuation process—during his six days at Bailey Island.
Of these eighty-one, he managed to cover only thirty-four.
Just as important, here is a spontaneous survey of topics that were uppermost in Jung’s mind during September 1936 and October 1937.
As the audience was composed of benevolent followers, Jung could allow himself to be informal.
It was the explicit wish of the organizers that the seminars should be “as strictly private and informal as the [preceding] Harvard event had been prestigious and formal.”3
No newsmen were allowed.
The lectures contain spur-of-the-moment responses to questions from the
audience.
They were given in front of a limited audience of especially invited people, usually
Jung’s followers, analysts, students, and analysands.4
The seminars were turned into simple transcripts from shorthand notes made by a few selected seminar members, then copied, bound, and distributed before Jung had the chance to comment, change, or edit them.5
Jung actually wrote to ask for a copy of the Bailey Island notes to review and edit in connection with a request from the publishing house Harcourt Brace and Company to publish the seminars.
Jung requested that a note should be added to the introduction of the seminars that read:
“Dr. Jung has consented to let these notes be distributed to those present at the talks without his final suggestions or corrections. Any errors or shortcomings that have occurred are the responsibility of the Notes Committee.”6
The second part of the seminars, those held in New York in 1937, were originally not
planned for, so that, in a sense, the seminars given at Bailey Island were at the time considered “completed.”
But even as Jung sent his request for a copy to review, there were budding plans
for another trip to America for the autumn of 1937.7
These plans may have played a role in holding back the publication of the Bailey Island seminars.
In the end, these publication plans were never realized, but then, considering how much Jung disclosed in the seminars about Wolfgang Pauli’s personality and family, what would have remained in a publishable version of the seminars?
Instead, the seminars were (as was the case with many other seminar notes transcribed from Jung’s lectures and speeches) printed and circulated privately to a restricted list of subscribers.
For many years they were kept in Jungian libraries, accessible only to readers on approval, for instance, if the reader had completed a certain number of hours of Jungian analysis.8
THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE SEMINARS AT BAILEY ISLAND
In 1935 Jung celebrated his sixtieth birthday and was appointed titular professor of psychology at the ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich.
Two years before, in 1933, he had started to give lectures at the ETH that were open to the public, lectures that became so popular that it was difficult to find a seat.9
In August 1935 Jung decided to give a lecture at the Eranos conference on a selection of Wolfgang Pauli’s dreams, called “Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process,” without disclosing the identity of the dreamer.10
The lecture on Pauli’s dreams was held less than a year after Pauli had ended analytical contact with Jung in October 1934.11
This was Jung’s third lecture at the Eranos conferences, a yearly event held in Ascona, Switzerland, on the shores of Lago Maggiore.
The Eranos meetings were initiated by Mrs. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a Dutch woman with a strong interest in Jung’s psychology, symbolism, art, and religion, especially the encounter between Eastern and Western religions and philosophies.12
In August 1935, Jung had already received an invitation to Harvard University to participate in the tercentenary celebrations that were scheduled to take place from September 16 to 18, 1936, at the occasion.
He was also to receive the honorary degree of doctor of science.13 Once the news
about his coming to the United States was released, he was swamped with requests for different kinds of engagements, social as well as professional.
Kristine Mann, Eleanor Bertine, and Esther Harding invited him to come and give lectures to their circle.
Apparently Jung gave them a choice of topics for the subject of the seminars, and they chose “the individuation process traced through a series of dreams or fantasies.”14
During the early months of 1936 they made plans for Jung and Emma Jung’s visit.
They arrived on August 30 in New York.
The Jungs had received many invitations and started their sojourn by spending the weekend at the home of Anglican bishop James De Wolf Perry, in Providence, Rhode Island.15
(His son, John Weir Perry, was twenty-two at the time and later became a Jungian analyst and psychiatrist.)16 During the Harvard celebration, the Jungs stayed
with Stanley Cobb, professor of neurology.17
After the tercentenary events, at which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a featured speaker, Jung was interviewed and made statements about Roosevelt and world politics that he later may have regretted.
He said: “Before I came here, I had the impression that one might get from Europe, that he was an opportunist, perhaps even an erratic mind. Now that I have seen him and heard him when he talked at Harvard, however, I am convinced that here is a strong man, a man who is really great.”
In the newspaper article, Jung was quoted as saying that he “paid his respects to dictators, explaining their rise as due to the effort of peoples to delegate to others the complicated task of managing their collective existence so that individuals might be free to engage [in] ‘individuation.’ ”18
The seminars on Pauli’s dreams were given at the small Library Hall at Bailey Island, off the coast of Maine, where Kristine Mann had her ancestral home.
Her father, a Swedenborgian minister, had purchased a cottage on the island where Mann had spent her childhood summers, a location that was reminiscent of her mother’s native Denmark.
Beginning in 1926, during the summer months the three women had their analytical practices in Dr. Mann’s house on the bank overlooking the ocean (otherwise, they had their practices in New York).
The house, known locally as the “the Trident,” had a posted sign at the doorbell advising, “Ring once for Dr. Mann; Ring twice for Dr. Bertine; Ring thrice for Dr. Harding.”19
In January 1936 already more than a hundred people had applied to attend the seminars.
Harding wrote to Jung that they would have to impose “drastic restrictions” to keep the number to what the Bailey Island Hall could handle.20
There were also many requests for private sessions during his stay, and it seems that Jung at first declined but changed his mind, perhaps giving in to
“clamorous” requests.21
These sessions would have been given in the afternoons, while the seminars were held each morning for two hours.
The lectures began with replies to written questions to the preceding lecture, if any had been handed in.
The seminar event at Bailey Island was framed by festivities, all kinds of parties, where everybody had the chance to contribute and to meet and talk with the Jungs.22
A film called The Mountain Chant was shown to the participants of the seminar, made by Laura May Adams Armer.
Mrs. Armer was almost certainly among the participants of the seminar.
The film portrays the sacred Mountain Chant ceremony of the Navajo Indians.23
There were also charades, dramatic sketches, singing, and folk dancing.
Claire Dewsnap remembers participating in a charade representing the four psychological types, in which she took the part of intuition.
Jung, who entered heartily into all these activities, guessed rightly and said, “That must be ‘intuition’ jumping up and down recklessly from the chair to the top of the piano.”
Those who got to be his partner in the folk dancing were especially elated. On the evening of the final seminar there was a snake dance.24
The weather was rather cool, around seventeen degrees Celsius, with a light rain, and thick fog covered the island during the whole event; only at the very end, when they were leaving the island, a glorious sun appeared.
Despite the fog, the Jungs seemed to have immensely enjoyed the Maine coast,
exploring it by sailboat.25
Sadly, no list of participants has been found.26
Of the hundred or so participants, only a few are identifiable.
A great help in this regard has been the preserved photographs taken by Francis
B. Bode at the occasion.27
There is also a short silent movie made by Dr. Eugene Henley capturing Jung and the participants gathering at Bailey Island Library Hall.28
Henrietta Bancroft was one of four note takers; the others were Natalie Evans, Ruth Conrow, and Ruth Magoon.29
Three of them took down Jung’s words in shorthand during the first hour and transcribed the work in the afternoon.
The fourth, who was a court stenographer, preferred to work alone and did the second hour of the lecture.30
Afterward, all the notes were given to Sallie Pinckney, who edited and bound them and provided copies to the attendees of the seminar.
Jung in America and the Radicals around Beatrice Hinkle
One of the most influential persons present at the seminar was Dr. Beatrice Hinkle.
She brought with her a large group of friends and colleagues.
To understand Jung’s relationship to America and Americans and the reception of Jung’s ideas in America, it is crucially important to consider the role of Hinkle.
Recent research has made it clear that Jung’s work was already known in its own right for several years before his trip to the 1909 Clark University conference with Freud and Ferenczi.31
His experimental studies with the Word Association Test, conducted while working under the direction of Eugene Bleuler at the Burghölzli clinic, were recognized as pivotal contributions to psychiatry and were quickly translated into English by the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer (1866–1950) and the neurologist Frederick W. Peterson (1859–1938).
The latter collaborated with Jung in 1906 and 1907, later sending his staff to do the same.
Jung already knew English at the time, writing papers in English and treating American analysands.
Later, he said that he gave seminars in English because the English and Americans were the first to recognize the value of his work.32
Both Meyer and Peterson had studied under August Forel (1848–1931), and Meyer was a classmate of Eugene Bleuler’s.
Meyer moved to the United States in 1891, where he was recruited by Stanley Hall (a psychologist and also president of Clark University) for Worcester State Hospital, and later he was invited by Peterson to serve as chief pathologist at the New York
State Mental Hospitals.
Influenced by Forel’s revolutionary approach to psychiatric asylums, he engaged in transforming American hospitals, introducing a germinal form of what later became
known as the psycho-bio-social approach to the treatment of mental illness.
Peterson, later a professor at Cornell Medical School, had also studied the new dynamic psychology in Vienna and Zurich for a few years, and after working with Jung at the Burghölzli, he translated Jung’s book on dementia praecox into English in 1909, the first book on psychoanalysis translated into English, before any book by Freud.33
As a result, Jung, rather than Freud, was the main draw at the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Clark University in 1909.34
Through Meyer and Petersen came the Zurich connection to American medical psychology.
Cornell Medical School became a seedbed for the Jungian movement in the United States.
In 1908 Beatrice M. Hinkle (1874–1953), by then a single mother of two children, joined the staff headed by Peterson’s close associate Charles L. Dana (1852–1935), a leading neurologist who founded a psychotherapy clinic based on the latest techniques.
A year later, Kristine Mann (1873–1945) came to study at Cornell, where she received her MD in 1913.
Hinkle most likely attended the Clark University lectures in 1909.
She was initially more taken with Freud; she traveled to Vienna to study psychoanalysis and underwent Freudian analysis that same year.
In 1911 she accompanied Freud and Jung to the Psychoanalytic Congress in Weimar.35
After returning she returned to the Cornell staff at the medical school and also opened a private analytical practice.
It is very likely that Hinkle attended Jung’s lecture at the extension course in medicine at Fordham University in 1912, to which Jung was invited by Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866–1945).36
Jelliffe was one of the founders of the Psychoanalytic Review, the first journal on psychoanalysis in the English language, in which Jung’s Fordham lectures were published in the inaugural volume.37
It was in this journal that Jung argued for the need of further developing
psychoanalytic theory, referring to William James’s pragmatic rule of scientific endeavor: that theories are instruments, not definitive answers to enigmas on which we can rest.38
Jung thereby demarcated his freedom from the ideas of Freud.
Jung had left for New York in September 1912 just as the second part of Transformation and Symbols of the Libido had appeared in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen.
Hinkle took it on herself to translate this work into English, in an edition printed in 1916 with the title The Psychology of the Unconscious.
In 1913 Hinkle invited Jung to lecture at the Liberal Club.
There is no record of Jung’s March 27 talk, but the topic was dreams.
There were also other reasons for Jung’s visit to America in 1913: he went to
analyze the heiress Edith Rockefeller, the daughter of the millionaire oil baron John D. Rockefeller.
Jung had been introduced to him the year before by another of his analysands,
Medill McCormick.
Hinkle was very active in a number of radical cultural organizations.
She influenced the socialist magazine the Masses, the literary journal the Seven Arts, and the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theater company, to which playwright Eugene O’Neill belonged.39
The Liberal Club had been started by the Episcopal minister Percy Stickney Grant in 1907, with the help of Charlotte Teller, a young Greenwich Villager.
In 1912, Hinkle introduced Teller to Jung.
Teller conducted a comprehensive interview with Jung that she published in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times with the headline “America Facing Its Most Tragic Moment.”40
The Liberal Club discussed topics such as birth control, divorce, and the labor
struggle.
The club soon split into several factions, and a more radical subgroup functioned as an unofficial center for creative young people in Greenwich Village.
Hinkle introduced Jung to this circle, of which Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese artist and poet, was a member. He did a pencil portrait of Jung.41
Jung also attended a dinner party hosted by members of another radical club, the Heterodoxy Club, America’s first feminist group.
Hinkle was a member, and a few members of the group were her analysands, including Margaret Doolittle Nordfeldt, the secretary-treasurer of the
Provincetown Players, who was married to Bror Nordfeldt, a Swedish artist who painted the scenery for their theatrical productions.
Margaret Doolittle Nordfeldt attended the Bailey Island seminar.
Another attendee at the seminar from the Heterodoxy Club was Amy Springarn.
She was married to Joel Springarn, cofounder of the publishing firm Harcourt Brace and Company, which published Jung’s and Hinkle’s books.
Joel Springarn was well known for his effort to add a statement condemning racial discrimination to the platform of the Progressive Party.
As well as for her radical affiliations, Hinkle may have been marginalized because of her eclectic approach to psychotherapy.42
Mann had been teaching English for four years at Vassar College in New York, where she developed lifelong friendships with three of her students, Cary Fink (later Baynes), Elizabeth Goodrich, and Eleanor Bertine.
As mentioned above, she joined the Cornell Medical School in 1908, earning an MD in 1913.
In 1917 she first encountered Jung’s teachings in Hinkle’s translation of “Transformations and Symbols of the Libido,” and she became Hinkle’s patient in
1919.43
In 1920 Mann became director of the Health Center for Business and Industrial Women in New York. The same year she traveled with Hinkle and Bertine to England to attend Jung’s lectures in Sennen Cove, Cornwall.
Mann studied with Jung during the 1920s and hosted a lecture by him in her New York apartment on Fifty-Ninth Street when he visited the United States in 1925.44
She opened an analytical practice in New York and gathered people around her who laid the foundation for the Jungian community in New York.
In 1928 she traveled to Zurich to begin an analysis with Jung that lasted until 1938, in which she produced paintings that Jung later published and commented
on in several reworked editions, from the Eranos lecture 1933,
“The Integration of the Personality” in 1939 to the volume Gestaltungen des Unbewussten (Formations of the unconscious) in 1950.45
Eleanor Bertine (1887–1968), born in Manhattan, graduated cum laude at Vassar College, where she encountered Kristine Mann as a teacher.
She entered Cornell Medical School in 1909, graduating with honors and completing several internships in hospitals.
In 1916 she practiced general medicine in New York City, and it was during these early days that she discovered Jung with Kristine Mann.
At the end of World War I she accepted a position as head of the college division of lecturers, touring the country to introduce new approaches to mental hygiene.46
She proved to be instrumental in dispersing Jung’s ideas in America, when, for instance, she booked Beatrice Hinkle and Constance Long, the first British psychiatrist to follow Jung’s methods, as speakers for the International Conference of Medical Women in 1919.47
Long had studied with Jung at his Küsnacht home and also had arranged Jung’s seminar in Cornwall on Arthur John Hubbard’s Authentic Dreams of Peter Blobbs and of Certain of His Relatives.48
In 1920 Bertine traveled to London with Mann to attend Jung’s seminar and to begin analysis with Long.
This encounter with Jung led Mann and Bertine to travel to Zurich from 1921 to 1922 to analyze and study with him there.
The Cornwall seminar was also attended by the English-born Mary Esther Harding (1888–1971).
She graduated from the London School of Medicine for Women in 1914.
During World War I, she conducted research on diphtheria, thereby contracting the disease, and for a period of time her life hung by a thread. After she recovered, she opened a private practice in London and rented a room to a consulting analyst, Mary Bell, who introduced her to Long and to Jung.49
She then also traveled to Zurich to study with Jung, and there she befriended Mann and Bertine.
In 1923 she decided to move from England to join them in New York, where they all established their practices.50
They became staunch allies of Jung and regularly traveled to Europe to attend
his lectures and to continue analysis with him. ~Suzanne Gieser, Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process, Pages 9-16
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