Turning Toward Individuation: Carol Sawyer Baumann’s Interpretation of Jung, 1927-1932
To assess fully Sawyer Baumann’s inner response to Jung would be difficult, given the available documentation.
However, understanding the context of her family of origin could help to both enrich our understanding of Sawyer’s move to Zürich and draw in new characters for examination.
In addition, she was heavily involved in the Psychological Club and the larger community around Jung, both of which influenced her life and thought.
Therefore, in addition to examining the family context from whence she came, a further endeavor would be to reconstruct the social milieu of her life in Zürich.
Future work is indicated to develop the interaction of Sawyer Baumann’s New England family, Jung, and the Zürich circle.
The people in Sawyer Baumann’s extended family, including her family of origin, were thoughtful and creative.
Among her relatives were several artists, professors at prestigious institutions, a Pulitzer Prize winner, politicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs.
According to reports from the surviving descendants, Carol Fisher (later Sawyer Baumann) was raised in a household that valued art, nature, literature, music, international travel, and philosophical discourse.
Taken into consideration alongside the purported features of the Analytical Psychology Club, perhaps Sawyer Baumann’s move to Zürich could be considered less a turning away from social expectations and more a return to an environment that was in many ways familiar.
This supposition could be tested by developing the interaction between Sawyer Baumann’s family members, including the two cousins who were also analyzed by Jung.
What was it about this larger family that produced not one but three analysands?
Furthermore, Sawyer Baumann’s mother, father, and brother took appointments with H. G. Baynes during his time in the United States and continued to discuss the implications of analysis in their correspondence for the next 20 years.
Patty Bacon may have been analyzed and the wife of the third cousin entered analysis alongside her husband.
What was it about this family that created so many connections to Jung and the early Jungians?
Regarding Carol Sawyer Baumann’s influence on Jung, the documents do provide
some information.
Carol Sawyer Baumann, and, to a lesser extent, Leonard Bacon, was arguably Jung’s staunchest defender against charges of anti-Semitism following World War II, representing Jung’s work during the war to the community in New York (Baumann, 1945), interviewing him for a published response to the accusations (Baumann, 1949), and, as mentioned above, being the first Jungian to bring analytical theory to Münich following the war.
Furthermore, she was a strong liaison between the Zürich community and the Analytical Psychology Club of New York and lectured in London and Geneva as well (Baumann, 1939a, 1945b, 1946b, 1948; Jung, 1946).
The process of constructing the historical narrative of Jung includes the in- and out-breath of these two gestures: looking at the smaller, component pieces and placing them in their broader historical context.
This dissertation represents one round of this process.
There are several possibilities, arising out this narrative, for highlighting other components of Jung history.
Given the review of the literature, further historical development of the social milieu of the Psychological Club of Zürich that is inclusive, contextual, critical, and rigorous is indicated.
The motivation for such work comes at least in part from the philosophical pulse highlighted at the beginning of this dissertation, that is, the desire to understand the courageous act of becoming involved with a community such as the early Jungian community, with resultant benefits and costs.
Carol Sawyer Baumann was a remarkable and complex woman and one of many whose stories remain to be told. ~Amy Colwell Bluhm, Turning Toward Individuation: Carol Sawyer Baumann’s Interpretation of Jung, 1927-1932
